Great teen horror flick with a nice hint of originality.

Rating: 8/10 (15 September 2007)

Final Destination starts as 17 year old Alex Browning (Devon Sawa) & his classmates turn up at JFK airport in readiness to catch flight 180 to Paris, he boards the plane & it takes off & in midair it explodes killing everyone on-board. Alex them wakes up & realises it was a dream like vision, he becomes freaked out when the events which happened in his vision happen in real life & after causing a large commotion he along with several of his classmates are thrown off the plane before it takes off. They are left in the departure lounge as the plane takes off, then they all witness it as it blows up in mid air killing everyone aboard just like in Alex's vision. Those who walked off the plane try to get on with their lives but start to die under mysterious circumstances leading Alex to believe that death has come back to claim those he saved...
Co-written & directed by James Wong I have to say I thought Final Destination when it originally came out was a breath of fresh air for the horror genre which was producing boring unimaginative teen crap for years like they were coming off on a production line, at the time I originally saw it at the cinema I genuinely thought Final Destination tried to be something that bit different yet still gave horror fans what they wanted. The script by Wong, producer Glen Morgan & Jeffrey Reddick was apparently based on a potential The X-Files (1993 - 2002) episode & I must admit I loved the idea behind it, I thought it was clever, fun & made a great central premise for killing off teens in spectacular ways. The character's are good considering their clichÃ©d American teen origins, the dialogue is good with it's plot explained just about enough to make sense without going overboard & at less than 100 minutes it moves along like a rocket with some extremely satisfying & clever set-pieces. The film also has a healthy respect for the genre & there are lots of homages & references to other genre films including naming the cast after old horror stars & director's, Valerie Lewton anyone? Of course it's not perfect & I'm not trying to say it is, while they are OK the character's are just faceless teens when all said & done, the mortician character is just very out-of-place, one could say it's a touch silly & the set-pieces go from sinister & clever acts which conspire to dispense of a character to overblown full on ghostly events like possessed electric cables, exploding cars & entire house's blowing up & some of it's own rules are broken as if Alex wasn't the next victim because he never actually changed seats why did death try to kill him when he was at the cabin before Carter who was as it is revealed the next victim? Still, I'll leave the nit picking to the monkeys because I just thought it was a highly entertaining & pretty original teen horror flick with a good story & decent gore.
Director Wong does a good job & the film is very stylish & great to look at although I'm coming off the back of a terrible run of zero budget shot on a digital camcorder crap that makes something that looks this good an absolute god send. There's a lot of visual gags here, I loved the prevailing sense of doom at the airport with the informations boards displaying words like 'departed' & 'terminal'! Plus there's a John Denver song playing in the airport toilets &, of course, he died in a plane crash! I was more than pleased to see the makers haven't skipped on the gore either, there's decapitations, hangings, embalming's, stabbings, broken glass in necks, someone gets splattered by a bus in a great scene & there's plenty of blood splashed around. The film has a nice eerie tension & has a few genuine jumpy scare moments.
With a supposed budget of about $23,000,000 this is very well made, the CGI effects are decent although not perfect while the make-up effects are very good. The film is set in a south New York but was shot in British Columbia in Canada. The acting is pretty good from a recognisable & good looking teenage cast, horror regular Tony Todd makes a small & somewhat pointless cameo.
Final Destination is, in my humble opinion, one of the finest teen horror popcorn flicks this millennium & it's as simple & straight forward as that. This proved enough of a success to spawn two sequels, the even better Final Destination 2 (2003) & Final Destination 3 (2006).