Innovative movie wasted on teen audience.

Rating: Null/10 (29 January 2003)

In Final Destination the characters are all out to keep Death itself from finishing them off since they are supposed to have died anyways in a plane crash. Eerie premonitions, a plot that holds much potential, and a great atmosphere...all gone down the drain with the teen horror garbage. Instead of highly executed characters and a little more fleshing out, the film wastes everything to feed this thing to the gore-hungry teen audience. The issues of death and all its aftershocks could have been buttered up into a better movie overall if the studio had not cast a teen audience and set it among a high school crowd. For the benefit of the doubt there is one cardboard adult character who doesn't make it very long. The opening is flavored with enough eerie fingerfood to make you think you're in for a treat. But as soon as the plane goes kaboom, so does the film. After that, we look forward to whiny teens running around while Death hunts them down in more and more ridiculous ways. Take away the dressy plot and it boils down to nothing more than another slasher. We wait on end while the cast drops one by one. Actually, the death scenes are not the problem, it's the way they are set up and what's in between all the messiness. The characters who don't make it all die fascinating deaths. I use fascinating in the sense that a simple turn of events, the smallest detail, sets off a chain reaction that leads to a very bizarre ending for the unlucky survivors. Death never looked so stylish. Hell, these deaths are downright classy and sleek. Death in this film is like the shiny silver on the blade of a knife. But for all the eye-candy, the holes need to be covered up better. For one thing, why does the main character Alex have a premonition in the first place? Just so Death can play cat-and-mouse? And what's with the stock characters? It's really sad because beneath it's teen horror goofiness are the blueprints for a fine film. All they had to do was scrape off all the bubble gum. The film reaches heights when it deals with the survivors reactions to all the stuff happening to them, and their view on Death. The film touches on loneliness, fear, and rejection. A character study begun and not finished. In the end, it is all swept away for the Clearasil crowd.