Final Destination: Middle of the Pack

Rating: Null/10 (4 August 2001)

This is a movie that raises a very intriguing "what if" and then unfortunately squanders it away.
Now, if your standards are not very high, if you are satisfied that all a scary movie needs to be is one where they throw a cat into the frame or a psycho with 99 lives never dies and if you think "Scream" or "Friday the 13th" are "classics," then this movie is a certainly better than most in the genre.
But if you raise an intriguing premise, hire a good, solid cast that is clearly capable of acting - the final results are disappointing.
The movie starts out smart as a Twilight Zone/X-Files episode (as ex-writers of XFiles should) but then degenerates into a slasher movie. I don't think I'm saying too much in that other than the first death, the killings become less and less imaginative - instead of exploring the philosophical possibilities that are presented to the characters and then have them face death in a realistic sense (and thus scarier), we get killings done in the hokey, slasher movie style. And if it's not a spoiler, they insult our intelligence by trying to set up the ending for a sequel.
Too bad.
Because the cast is excellent and we could've gotten an intelligent creepy movie like SIXTH SENSE but instead we get a banal episode of the X-FILES.