Director: James Wong
Writers: Glen Morgan, James Wong
Cast: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Ryan Merriman, Kris Lemche, Alexz Johnson, Sam Easton, Jesse Moss, Gina Holden, Texas Battle, Chelan Simmons, Crystal Lowe, Amanda Crew
Runtime: 93 mins.
2006
After Final Destination 2 did all the good work of elevating the franchise, embracing a consistent tone, expanding the mythology, and adding a layer of meta-commentary, Final Destination 3 does the work of dismantling all that progress in favor of sexist reductive schlock. It was fun while it lasted.
Final Destination 3 is still fun in the way that a franchise about death invisibly hunting teenagers through Rube Goldberg machines must be fun, but this entry sure squeezes a lot of air out of the premise. Final Destination 3's initiating incident takes place on a roller coaster. Straight off the bat the movie lets us know we will not be caring about any of these characters. It also makes a needlessly big and complicated deal of who is sitting where on the coaster, for shaggy plot purposes. Then it hits us with the most ridiculous coaster-gone-wrong sequence that one could possibly imagine. Again, there is fun to be had with the inflated nonsense, but the sequence disrespects the dread surrounding FD1's plane crash, or the intricacy of FD2's car pile-up.
From there we trudge workmanlike through death after death, with no unifying thread beyond the main characters vaguely trying to stop it from happening. The first of these deaths is a twofer. Ditzy popular girls Ashlyn Halperin (Crystal Lowe) and Ashley Freund (Chelan Simmons) are best friends and horrible stereotypes. It's clear that the movie thinks it is having a bit of ironic fun when it traps them in tanning beds to burn to death, but really it's just ugly. There's a pervasive sexist thread that runs throughout the narrative, and this gruesome punishment of two airheaded image-obsessed girls is the worst embodiment of that. This is the traditional horror trope of the slut being punished for her sexuality at its nastiest, and the tone is all wrong for a doofy movie like this.
From there things get... better? Frankly, there are only so many times in a row one can see folks' heads get smashed before one starts to wonder if the movie is spinning its wheels. Whereas in the previous movies most deaths crafted a narrative that had a bit of fun with our expectations, Final Destination 3 seems mostly interested in making these characters pay penance for being cliches. Protagonist Wendy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is perhaps the exception to this. She's not a cliche, but she does wander about the film looking dazed, and her fate is kind of perplexing within the established canon of the universe. The movie ends on a weird repetitive stutter step that is not particularly satisfying, but is in keeping with the meanness of the rest of the story.
As a whole the film is awkward and clumsy and wretched. It just goes to show how crucial the tonal balancing act is, because it's not like this is hugely different than the other films content-wise. We even see the return of the creative team that were responsible for the first Final Destination, with James Wong directing and sharing screenplay credit with Glen Morgan. It's almost as if they saw the adjustments David R. Ellis made to their formula in the second movie, and determined that they would drag it kicking and screaming in the other direction. Perhaps in their own idiosyncratic way, they were trying to engineer the elaborate death of the franchise they brought to life six years previous. It didn't work though. We've still got two movies to go.
1 / 5 BLOBS
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