Inventive  but goes off the rails a bit!

Rating: 7/10 (14 February 2003)

PLOT SPOILERS ALERT!!! Final Destination was a mostly enjoyable journey  it tells the tale of a group of students who are thrown off a plane  because one of them has physic premonitions about the plane blowing up. Of course the plane blows up  but mysteriously  one by one  the survivors begin to die in horrible circumstances. They work out that they have averted `Death's plan' and Death is reworking their fates (to be even more horrible than the plane crash).
The plot sounds a little unbelievable  but it's an inventive and fresh take on the slasher-teen movies.
Even though the movie goes against the typical horror heroine  the hero  Alex has feminine qualities that make him feel quite vulnerable to the audience. Kerr Smith does a great job to go against type to play the macho jock who mostly wants to beat the fudge out of Alex (Devon Sawa)  miles away from Dawson's Creek.
The first couple of `death scenes' are truly horrific and violent  some of these are pretty much guaranteed to scare the bejesus out of most people.
But the movie tends to go off the rails a bit (after the train scene  funnily enough!). I think the writers had a `hard time' trying to come up with a way how to beat `Death' in the end. However the penultimate scene where Devon Sawa and Ali Later battle `Death' at Ali's house is quite `electrifying' (no pun intended!).
After watching the DVD extras (deleted scenes / interviews with `executives')  it documents the trouble the film makers had in making an audience satisfying ending. POSSIBLE PLOT SPOILERS  the original ending had Alex dying to save his pregnant girlfriend  thus cheating Death. But the test audience had a bad reaction to this  feeling a bit distant from it after the first half of the movie was so different. They reworked the ending  so Alex survived and Kerr Smith ultimately dies. This made it into a typical horror movie ending (you know  a final shock right before the end credits). I had just felt that both possible endings to the film were a bit of a let down  after the terrifying early death scenes  it doesn't seem like it goes out with a big enough bang.
Don't let my review put you off the movie though  go see it for an original take on the teen-horror genre.
7 out of 10