Never saw this coming

Rating: 5/10 (23 November 2007)

Final Destination had quite an impact on teen audiences. Far more than I thought it would. Its one of these horror films that suddenly emerges out of nowhere, and before you know it, its the one thing on everybody's lips. Such is the case that everybody already knows the plot before they sit down to actually watch the film.
FD is a film that feels particularly unnerving in these post 9/11 days. There's no actual terrorism present, but the sight of a plane exploding is sure to bring back memories of that dark day in New York.
And one of the film's central characters, Alex Browning (Devon Sawa) foresees the whole thing. He and a class of schoolmates are on they're way to Paris for a field trip, but Alex's vision throws a spanner in the works. He and six others get kicked off the plane, and not long after, it explodes.
The survivors barely have enough time to digest this when they start getting killed off one by one in a series of bizarre accidents. Death is not about to let people slip through its fingers, and Alex & Co must figure out a way to break the pattern of their supposed deaths before there won't be anyone left alive to do something about it.
For all its success, being expanded out into a trilogy and producing novelisations and such, Final Destination has a curiously thin premise to work from. Its basically a series of novelty death set-pieces strung together by a thin semblance of plot. That might not occur to you the first time around, but FD feels less satisfying the more times you view it.
I think for any teen film to be truly successful, it has to have a strong cast to pull it off. Films like Scream, The Faculty and Election were all excellent because of astute young actors playing their roles.
Unfortunately, Final Destination doesn't have an exceptionally bright cast. And other than Ali Larter's tough, resourceful turn, I found the rest of the teens in this film rather forgettable.
Any teen film that has Seann William Scott is bound to turn me off. Fortunately he's not in the film often enough to ruin it. But whenever he is around I tend to tune FD out.
Devon Sawa is quite boring as our teen hero. Maybe that's not all his fault. The writers after all keep having him spout dialogue about how they should have died on that plane. Their lives follow a pattern, something Alex's premonition has shattered. The different theories he kept spinning regarding all this really drove me crazy after a while.
Ali Larter is really the only one here that actually makes an impression. She was the only one I felt sympathetic to throughout all this. She seems capable and industrious. All she really needs is a worthwhile script to work from and she could go on to become one of Hollywood's greatest leading ladies.
Even the usually reliable Tony Todd seems a little off his game. He only gets a cameo appearance as a mortician, but even he fails to impress. Odd considering what a fine actor Todd is. He seems a little over the top, even borderline hammy as the creepy mortician musing over life's plan for us all. And that's all the more strange after seeing how perfectly sinister he can be in films like Candyman.
The film's selling point turned out to be its death sequences. I can tell the filmmakers have researched films like The Omen, where people died in bizarre occurrences through decapitations and impalings. Here they've taken those single scenes and made an entire film out of it.
One thing that does give Final Destination some novelty is that unlike most stalker/slasher films, the killer isn't someone running around in a mask brandishing a butcher knife, but ordinary, everyday household objects.
It provides quite a bit of fascination how each one of these little lambs is going to cop it next. One of them ends up strangled to death through a simple slip on a puddle. Another gets creamed by a bus. A scene that's become almost as imitated as Psycho's shower scene.
The problem with FD is that this is what propels the film. Take all of them away, and you haven't got much of a film left. And even these death scenes get tiresome after a while, because they get increasingly outlandish and over the top.
In spite of the effect it had on teen audiences, I do feel Final Destination is somewhat overrated. It provides jolts and shocks aplenty first time around. But the more times you watch it, the less inspired it seems.