Death Never Takes A Holiday

Rating: 7/10 (1 November 2008)

Watched merely 'because it was there', I was unexpectedly surprised by the quality of this movie.
With a youthful cast of - to me - largely unknowns, it didn't seem to offer more than the standard formulaic brat-slash twaddle. But I was wrong.
From the beginning it was entirely believable. These youngsters seemed to know their stuff, and whilst I never really cared for them, they at least conveyed a genuine fidelity to their parts. The growing hysteria with the anticipated plane-crash and the special-effects with which it was realised were extremely harrowing. The CGI was good enough to convince at first show, which is more than can be said for many a movie of much greater budget and scale.
How do you deal with someone who foresaw the crash in a world of air-terrorism? The authorities are phlegmatic and assume he must have had a hand in it somehow. Yet the inevitable and meticulous evaluation of the wreckage points to an accident. It's a dilemma. They just have to suspect him of something.
Meanwhile death has come-up short on its body-count and means to make good the deficit. And it's here that I knock points off. It is never explained (because Death doesn't give interviews) why it goes about developing such complicated and involved scenarios in order to harvest its crop. Why not just give them all heart attacks? The contrived and sometimes sudden deaths are tense, entertaining and shocking by turns but - as I say - the underlying premise of death's deviousness is never explained and leaves - at least for me - a gaping hole in the satisfaction ship.
Still; it's well-acted, well-directed, and well made. The effects are good and the surprises keep coming.
And one other thing that keeps coming that's no surprise at all is that its unexpected success has spawned a franchise of sequel after sequel.
Poor old Death, always playing catch-up to the accountants.