No respect, no respect at all

Rating: Null/10 (30 March 2000)

A teenage movie about death. Interesting but how do you get people to see it? Can't be serious - no one will come and it can't be campy - Hollywood won't finance it. So the lowest common denominator of teenage movies is loudness and violence. Throw in a little seriousness and make it a little campy. What you get is "The Final Destination", a film without any shred of merit nor decency. The film playfully bounces off the memory of two recent airplane disasters near New York, TWA 800 and Egypt Air 990 as well as John Denver's untimely air crash as if they were mere props to be used and abused. How ever did it manage to avoid John Kennedy Jr? Its ingenious setup of death as something no one can cheat is tossed aside in favor of a childish game of who will die next and in what manner of blood and gore - strangulation, bludgeoning, beheading, smacked dead by a bus or train, or worse, a runaway neon sign. You have a feeling the filmmakers initially wanted this film to take the high ground, especially the scene of the eulogy given by one of the teenage survivors, when he says death to young people shouldn't be thought of at a distance but as real as the next moment. But just as abruptly, the subdued turns heavy-handed and any semblance of caring turns into mindless pillage. "The Final Destination" starts out giving comfort to those who mourn but ends up desecrating life as well as death. Is that what teenage movies are all about?