Final Destination

Written by: Jeffrey Riddick, Glen Morgan, James Wong Starring: Devon Sawa, Ali Larter, Kerr Smith, Kristen Cloke, Seann William Scott

A high school class is on a plane, about to take off for ten days in Paris. Suddenly Alex (Devon Sawa) has a horrifying vision--or is it a dream?--of the plane exploding in midair. In a panic, he runs off of the plane, and some of his fellow passengers join him. Then, just as the previews predicted, the plane does indeed explode on takeoff. Thus begins “Final Destination,” a semi-occult thriller of decidedly less than Hitchcockian proportions. To be sure, Alex doesn't have just the one vision; a series of spooky warnings seem to speak to him from the minute the picture opens. The movie follows the by now well-known formula for these pictures: gather a group of attractive and well-groomed teens, and submit them to a variety of frightening and/or deadly experiences. Throw in a little teen humor for leavening, then stand back and watch the money roll in. If you think this is an easy ploy to execute, this picture will disabuse you of that notion.

The opening sequence of “Final Destination” has a nice rush to it, but it seems all downhill from there. (By the way, a similar formula applies to the teen sex comedies, except you submit the attractive and well-groomed teens to a variety of humorous and/or sexy experiences, but that's a subject for another discussion.) After the crash, Alex is treated as a pariah--a freak--by his classmates. Only the cool and slightly mystical Clear (Larter), a fellow survivor, seems to understand what he is going through. She is also the only one to thank him for saving her life, a sure sign if there ever was one that gratitude is in short supply at high school.

What follows is the sequential elimination of the rest of the survivors, in a series of gruesome accidents that seem at once perfectly reasonable and wholly impossible. They are killed off in an order that Alex (who has made the study of air disasters a hobby) concludes is related to their seating arrangement on the plane. The filmmakers repeat this information several times, but so fast that it made me think they were fudging a bit. There is a lot of talk about how they have to “break the code” in order to “cheat” death. Alex also concludes that they have to visualize the deaths before they happen in order to prevent them, but this is a rule so thinly applied that again I had the feeling that I was being fooled. It also felt as if the writers simply got too tired to make the patterns work, so they finished it up as fast as they could and hoped nobody would notice. The picture does end, er, abruptly. Other critics have declared that the picture takes on weightier themes--mortality, fate, control--than the average thriller, and I would grudgingly admit that there may be a bit of that in the picture, but nobody is going to mistake it for Kant.

I didn't learn anything from the picture, though I did develop a new respect for household appliances. The writers open a few doors, but they never really step through; it is as if they lacked the courage of their convictions, if they had any convictions to begin with. I walked out without any real sense of the picture’s point of view, though that may be setting the standard a little higher than is fair. Director Wong does a decent job, he gets a lot of moody mileage out of wind and leaves and rain (maybe a bit too much mileage). The picture is nicely shot, the unfortunate “accidents” are suitably jarring, and the actors are all appropriately photogenic, though Sawa lacks any discernable leading man qualities. Overall, “Final Destination” is watchable, maybe because it is mercifully short, but I can hardly recommend running out to see it. If you want something spooky and good, rent “The Sixth Sense” and call it a night. (4/3/00)