Director: James Wong
Writers: Glen Morgan, James Wong, Jeffrey Reddick
Cast: Devon Sawa, Ali Larter, Kerr Smith, Amanda Detmer, Chad Donella, Kristen Cloke, Seann William Scott, Tony Todd
Runtime: 98 mins.
2000
The premise of Final Destination is one that filled me with dread many years before I was allowed to watch the movie. What if death has a grand plan? What if that plan was disrupted by a vision that caused the saving of people who shouldn't be saved? What if death were petty and proceeded to hunt those people down by subtly manipulating their environments into complex death traps? This is the very situation that protagonists Alex Browning (Devon Sawa) and Clear Rivers (Ali Larter) find themselves in after Alex freaks out and gets a handful of people expelled from an airplane right before it explodes on take-off.
Final Destination finds itself at an odd nexus between the goofy teen slashers of the late 90's, as trailblazed by Scream, and the self-serious torture porn films of the 00's, as pioneered by Saw. It is a film caught in the middle, as evidenced by its schizophrenic approach to the material.
On the serious side, the film plays hard at drumming up dread. Devon Sawa's sweaty jitters work best in the first act, as Alex experiences a great deal of anxiety over the prospect on getting on an airplane for his class trip to France. Something just feels wrong about the whole thing. The entire sequence is designed to play hard on the audience's anxieties about flying. We may know intellectually that planes are safe, but there's a certain primal instinct that won't let us forget that we are defying nature every time we propel an enormous metal tube through the air.
Perhaps Final Destination's best trait, and almost certainly the one that launched it into the mainstream a decade and a half ago, is the conspiracy theory mentality at its core. Once we've seen death's plan for these characters in gory, explosive detail, there is something macabre yet appealing about watching Death KO them one by one. Death may be harsh, but it is fair. The fatalism of knowing Death's plan can come as somewhat of an existential comfort, despite its immediate terror.
But then the movie seems to want to twist that rumination on mortality around into a cruel ironic joke. Take the mid-film appearance of Tony Todd as a mortician named Bludworth. His casual cryptic philosophizing on the nature and motivations of Death is immensely entertaining, but also squarely in the realm of high camp. Death's schemes are so stuffed with dramatic irony that it's hard to take them seriously. And the characters can't help but say on the nose stuff like, "You've got your whole life ahead of you," or, "I'm never gonna die." All of this adds up to a film that oscillates between grim suspense and ironic goofiness.
It should come as no surprise that the film was originally conceived as a spec script for The X-Files, and then rewritten and directed by X-Files regulars Glen Morgan and James Wong. Unfortunately, stretched to feature length, Final Destination lacks the facility with which The X-Files juggles its disparate tones. The opening credits sequence is a great example of this. Shirley Walker's ominous score plays over dramatic close-ups of everyday household objects. There's an interesting sense of pantheism about the proceedings--in this movie objects themselves are endowed with malice--but it undercuts itself with the inherent ridiculousness of shooting a table fan like it's Freddy Krueger.
Horror comedy can be an exhilarating genre, but Final Destination hops between its poles too much to offer a functional synthesis. It weighs down its narrative with tedious speculation as to how exactly the invisible antagonist functions, as well as a lifeless subplot about a couple of Agents who tangentially get involved in the story, mostly to impede it. Orr perhaps they are there in a misguided attempt to make the proceedings more realistic. Luckily, one can place this tonal discordance aside long enough to enjoy the death sequences themselves, which are quite a bit of fun, and reasonably suspenseful in their construction. The best of these is certainly the Rube Goldberg kitchen sequence, a scene filled with gleeful audience fake-outs.
I may have complaints about the movie not picking a lane, but for a little movie about Death Itself hunting down a bunch of teenagers through the power of happenstance to be entertaining or functional in any way is miraculous. Besides, any film in which a threatening mortician named Bludworth warns the protagonists that, "You don't even wanna fuck with that mac daddy," in reference to the grim specter of Death... well, that's a movie that's alright by me.
2 / 5 BLOBS
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