imaginative thriller that overdoses on special effects

Rating: Null/10 (18 March 2001)

`Final Destination' is a fairly creepy, moderately entertaining little horror film dedicated to the proposition that, although one may not be able to exactly `cheat' death, one may be able to beat it on its own terms fair and square  provided one can figure out the rules that is.

The movie begins as a group of forty high school students and three of their teachers board a plane departing from JFK on a field trip to Paris. Immediately before takeoff, one student receives a premonition that the plane will explode moments after becoming airborne, a vision that manages to get himself and several other passengers safely off before the inevitable occurs. But as Alex and his fellow survivors soon discover, Death is not to be avoided quite so easily, as each becomes the target of a systematic plan of elimination.
If the details of the initial premise sound familiar, it is probably because they match almost perfectly those surrounding the downing of Flight 103 back in 1996. Waving aside questions of taste and propriety  is it really right to use the details of a real life tragedy as fodder for a silly little horror flick?  let us concede that `Final Destination' taps into some pretty basic fears about the uncertain, random and arbitrary nature of Death. The idea itself is enough to make us all stop and ponder the truth of our mortality and the truly tenuous thread by which we daily cling to this thing we call life. But like so many horror films in the modern era, the premise is better than the execution. The various deaths depicted herein become so choreographed and preposterous in their details that they actually end up diluting some of their own ability to disturb and terrify. Indeed, the more elaborate and high tech the death scenes become, the less creepy they seem. We become bemused and detached when we should be cringing and empathetic. Death simply has to work too hard in some of these scenes and the strain shows.
Thus, for all its originality of premise, the film, by making Death seem like nothing more disturbing than a conventional special effects showoff, robs Man's greatest enemy of his awe-inspiring and overwhelming power and sting!