Final Destination

FINAL DESTINATION

Rating: C
When I went to see this movie Sunday night, the theater was packed. Why weren't these people home watching the Oscars? Obviously, they cared nothing about movies.

Devon Sawa plays a high school kid traveling to France with his classmates. Onboard the airplane prior to takeoff, he has a disturbing vision of the flight going down in flames, and causes such a ruckus about it that he and several friends are forcibly removed. No sooner are his classmates at his throat for getting them thrown off, then the plane takes off and erupts in a fireball before their eyes. They've all just narrowly cheated death. Or have they?

Why Sawa has his lifesaving vision is never fully explained. Although not absolutely crucial to the story, I think the filmmakers missed an opportunity to add another eerie element to the plot by ignoring this question. Likewise, although the scene of the plane blowing up is not without merit, it seems like it could have been milked a little more - sort of the feeling you get when the punch line of a joke isn't quite right. Anyway, what Sawa, his friend Ali Larter (playing a girl named Clear Rivers - poor thing) and the rest of the bunch soon realize is that Death is not so easily cheated. Seems the guy has a master "design," and if you avoid him today he'll be back to collect the rent tomorrow.

The first to go is Sawa's friend Tod. Tod is a klutz. He cuts himself after one stroke with the razor (it usually takes me at least two or three). How he manages to accidentally hang himself in the bathroom is still a little unclear, even after I watched it happen. Suffice it to say that Death is apparently a fan of Rube Goldberg. The poor teacher's fate is even worse. Not only does every bad thing imaginable happen to her (I always knew computers secretly had it in for us), but every effort she makes to escape simply compounds her predicament. You feel like compassionately offering the advice of hurry up and die already, before it gets any worse. It's easy to think director James Wong is playing such scenes deliberately for laughs, which indeed he might be, but such an approach doesn't jibe well with some of the other death scenes, which are simply violent and shocking.

Final Destination has some interesting ideas, but I get the impression somewhere along the line the script was gutted of its intelligence and the action aspects played up instead. Which results in lots of scenes with sparking electrical wires, and heavy objects hurtling through the air. And characters don't always behave logically, to say the least. But perhaps the poorest showing is made by Death himself. If he was really as incompetent as he's portrayed in this film, all of us would live forever.