So far this year it sets the standard for thriller movies

Rating: 7/10 (1 April 2000)

Few thrillers explore just how terrifying death can be. Most are concerned with mysteries, chases and nearly immortal bad guys.
"Final Destination," however, seems to want to put the entire focus of fright on death itself. Viewers find themselves thinking much more about how they think characters are going to die, and less about why.
Such a result can be chiefly attributed to the plot. Devon Sawa plays a high school student set to take a class trip to France. However, before the plane takes off, he envisions its explosion and demands to be removed from the plane. The commotion forces several other passengers off the plane, and, taking off without them, it explodes in mid-air.
For the rest of the movie, those who got off the plane are stalked by death itself, who apparently was not amused by being cheated out of several lives.
There's little in terms of a story here, and the acting is just sort of blah. But by having no real villain in the film, it frees the death scenes into becoming among the most elaborate productions of any movie. There are no guns, axes or knives (well, almost no knives) that are standard in every other horror flick. Instead, this movie creates death scenes that require complex chains of events.
The thought this movie must have taken is amazing  not only to imagine the half-dozen death scenes that are in the movie  but to create circumstances that mislead the viewer into thinking others will occur.
Execution helps pull everything together. As elaborate and fast-paced as the action sequences are, the viewer can still figure out how it works because of perfect camera work.
The problems with this movie all result from a fruitless effort to make the movie overly intelligent. For example, as Sawa's character tries to figure out how to cheat death again, he breaks in to the mortuary to visit death's first victim after the plane crash. If that weren't ridiculous enough, he is confronted by the mortician who tells him (in a spooky voice) the secret behind death. This scene could (and should) have simply been deleted from the movie.
When the movie is not trying to be too intellectual, however, it's terrificly frightening and makes viewers squirm in their seats. So far this year, it sets the standard for thriller movies.