With FINAL DESTINATION 3, the filmmakers haven’t built a better mousetrap, but at least the mousetrap still snaps, breaks necks and draws blood. Lots of blood.

By now, the setup should be rote: Teenager has a preminition of a tragic event surrounding a (insert mode of transportation here), so he/she declines the ride, along with a few others. The tragedy does indeed occur, and since the youngsters cheated death’s plan, death comes back to claim them, in increasingly elaborate, Rube Goldbergian setups that prove the Grim Reaper must have majored in engineering. In the original film, the vehicle in question was an airplane. In the second film, it was a car. For this third entry, it was either a rollercoaster or a scooter, so they smartly went with the coaster.

SKY HIGH’s Mary Elizabeth Winstead has the starring role of a high school senior taking pictures for the yearbook at the amusement park on the night of the rollercoaster accident. Lucky for her, she had snapped photos of everyone who had gotten off the ride with her, because those pictures contain clues about how they’re going to die, thus giving her a chance to save them. Sometimes she does, sometimes she doesn’t.

And it’s when she fails miserably that the film is most entertaining, because no one goes to a FINAL DESTINATION movie to not see deaths. You get to see some great, really gory scenes involving death by tanning bed, nailgun and weight machine, among others, but they’re shot and edited in a way that makes it difficult to tell just what exactly is going on. You also have to suspend that disbelief in a major way and not ask questions like, “What would two real swords be doing on the wall over a benchpress, anyway?”

The acting is pretty bad (Winstead excepted), the dialogue unrealistic, but FINAL DESTINATION 3 does deliver as a horror-thriller, and that’s all that counts. Director/co-writer James Wong, who helmed the original but sat out the sequel, returns for another go-round and the result definitely earns its R rating and secures the life of the franchise. You have to appreciate grim humor – especially during such gratuitous sequences as the salon, with the topless chicks gyrating to “Love Rollercoaster” seconds before they get toasted extra-crispy – and disposable characters meeting gory fates. And I certainly do, although I felt a little guilty enjoying the grisly carnage hours after someone I know got hit by a car. FINAL DESTINATION 2 is still my favorite of the three, but this is still a pleasantly unpleasant diversion and I look forward to the next one.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 10th, 2006 at 10:30 am and is filed under Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.