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Friday, February 10, 2006
Lazy 'Final 3' meanders down the same bloody road
The premise behind the "Final Destination" franchise is pure genius: Fate takes a hand whenever photogenic teenagers skip their appointment with death. That hand simply sets in motion a random series of events and Death (who apparently has a playful, if morbid, sense of humor) steers them into a cascade of cause and effect that ultimately produces a spectacularly improbable death.
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View all photosIt's chaos theory (the survivors become veritable engines for random phenomenon) meets intelligent design (these elaborate Rube Goldberg-esque chain reactions are too complex and coincidental to have arisen by chance), calculated with fuzzy math. It doesn't even have to make any sense as long as it looks cool and ends with a dead teenager splattered all over the screen.
That's exactly what the third go-round delivers. The survivors of a rollercoaster disaster are dispatched by tanning beds, weight-training benches, nail guns and a runaway engine block. The earnest attempts by sullen control freak Wendy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and wide-eyed nice guy Kevin (Ryan Merriman) to convince their fellow marked teens of the supernatural death sentence simply mark time between the grisly punch lines.
Original director James Hong and his writing and producing partner, Glen Morgan, return, ostensibly to inject a little of the kinetic creativity to the gimcrack domino effects, but they just go through the motions with lazy ideas and indifferent execution.
There's every reason to believe the creators stopped taking it seriously a long time ago. What's bothersome is that they don't take the audience seriously enough to deliver an actual movie. Directed with such sober overkill that it crosses into self-parody, there's no suspense or tension and little gallows humor, merely dead space between the next spectacular spray of blood and body parts.
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