reMedia!

An entertainment blog that pops culture right in the kisser.

Tuesday, August 08, 2006

film | Death, be not dumb

Death, take a holiday — please. Because you must be absolutely knackered after masterminding the elaborately wicked booby traps that kill, oh, the entire cast of FINAL DESTINATION 3. And that ain't no spoiler — nuh-uh, not even close, since the target audience of this escalatingly goofy franchise actually pays good money to watch the Grim Reaper spring a bounty of inescapable domino-effect perils on a group of hapless young victims. Or, if you prefer, a Final Destination flick with definite survivors is like a Dateline interview in which Tom Cruise comes off as a rational, sane and lucid person.

As far as characters dying, then, it's less a matter of if they will than how they're going to. 2000's original Final Destination was schlocky trash, but it managed to wring a few supremely effective shocks out of its nifty premise, while its 2003 sequel turned most remaining jolts into bad jokes. Blame further diminishing returns, déjà vu or a teen-horror genre that's grown increasingly desperate, but Final Destination 3 feels mechanical, lethargic and uninspired. It promises a series of particularly sicko mad-lib collaborations between Rube Goldberg and Stephen King —

1) Scary noise: ____________
2) Action verb: ____________
3) Profane exclamation: ____________
4) Sigh of relief: ____________
5) Benign household item: ____________
6) Action verb: ____________
7) Benign household item: ____________
8) Action verb: ____________
9) Benign household item: ____________
10) Action verb: ____________
11) Sharp household item: ____________
12) Violent action verb: ____________
13) Tender part of body: ____________
14) Squishy sound: ____________

— but hands you a dollar-store puzzle book with all the dots connected and the numbers already painted-by instead. The film fails to continually surprise; once you spy the nail gun, the tanning bed or the especially wobbly piece of gym equipment, you're counting the seconds until some poor soul is spiked, fried or has their noggin popped whitehead-style. Give Final Destination 3 a couple points, however, for employing an automobile engine fan as a cranial Ginsu in its lone genuinely nasty whammy.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Sky High) plays a yearbook photographer who has a bloodcurdling vision of her and her classmates' demises in a freak rollercoaster accident at a school carnival. Her histrionics at the ride's gate manage to spook several friends and acquaintances into detraining — and it's a good thing, too, as the carts do, in fact, jump the tracks mid-loop (leading to a huge plot hole involving a video camera, but I digress). In the days following, of course, the voracious specter of doom begins to catch up with each of them in the precise order they'd have been splattered against the tilt-a-whirl, blah blah blah. The obvious message behind director James Wong (The X-Files) and co-writer Glen Morgan's screenplay — aside from "ca-ching!" — is that nobody can cheat death. Cheating movie-goers, on the other hand ... D

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