"You've got your whole life ahead of you"

Rating: 4/10 (15 July 2000)

I have to confess that after The Sixth Sense debacle, every magazine giving away the twist, I avoided reading a single review of Final Destination until I'd actually seen the thing. The fact that there IS no clever twist doesn't make it a bad film, just one more factor making it a mediocre one.
Glen Morgan and James Wong, Executive Producers for both "Space: Above and Beyond" and "The X-Files", dealt a lot of expectation for this movie. Their ten scripts for The X-Files (most notably "Squeeze", "Beyond The Sea" and "E.B.E.") created high hopes. But then high hopes is what the ant had and it didn't do him much good either.
Maybe, like me, you're the anally retentive sort that is distracted by detail. Like in similarly air-based "Die Hard 2", where Bruce asks an airport receptionist to send a fax. The fact that this plot development saw her send the fax upside down - meaning the other end would have received only a blank sheet of paper - kept distracting me. Likewise, the two girls who ask the leads to change seats so that they can sit together. Why? There were three seats in each row anyway!
But I digress. The film, itself, then, is the sort of movie that has that peculiar type of Transatlantic irony - ie., not really very funny, but we'll pretend it is and send it up anyway. I hate snobbery, but suffice it to say if you think the "humour" within this film is "wry" or "clever" then you're probably dead from the neck up. A bit like the guy in this film who... no, that's a spoiler... The "joke" is sewn right from the start, with multiple "ironic" references to impending doom, the lead quote from this review being probably the most subtle. There's also an unjustifiably snotty jibe at the much more entertaining and likeable "Stuart Little".
The actual idea behind the picture - a group cheat death only to find the laws of death's predeterminism creeping up on them - looks tremendous on paper, and could have made for a fantastic movie. But while the initial idea is strong, and relatively original, the conception is weak and flawed. For a start, there's the average direction and acting, coupled with the age of the group. If this had been a much older cast, rather than schoolkids, it would have possible to get more depth into the piece. But then again, maybe it would have been nice not to have a 100% all-white, sparkly-teethed photogenic cast either. A little character variation wouldn't have gone amiss.
Proceedings carry on as the characters each in turn meet a grisly death. While I won't, to be spoiler-free, reveal who gets it first, it is pretty obvious that the guy that puts the pieces together WON'T get it too early on in the movie. It's also basic narrative convention that the more interesting ones will get a slightly longer lifespan. In Hollywood only the bland die young. So knowing what trio will live on to see out most of the duration takes the fun away a little.
One nice possible in-joke was the lead denying having a "narcisstic DD complex" Anyone know what this is? Wouldn't be a reference to a certain Mr. Duchovny by any chance? Other than the everyday, run-of-the-mill execution, the other problem I had was with the scariness of the movie. A fantastic trailer was shown on television, showing people leaping out of their seats, hurling popcorn everywhere. As a bit of an idiot, I had planned to see the film with friends and do this whether I found it scary or not, just to act the fool. As it turned out, two other people in the cinema meant we couldn't justify making idiots of ourselves to such a small audience, and was there really any time when such a reaction would be appropriate? Honestly, I didn't even jump once. Wes Craven and his silly Scream has got a lot to answer for...