Starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Ryan Merriman
Time to finish off this series. Yes, folks, I've reviewed every Final Destination film here on the blog with the exception of this one, checking off Parts 4 and 5 when they were released in theaters and dusting out the first two flicks in increments within the past couple years. Folks, it's a little difficult writing reviews of all these films and coming up with different things to say. Again...if you've seen one of these movies, you've seen them all. That goes for pretty much every slasher flick ever released (with a few notable exceptions), but it holds doubly true for the FD franchise. See the above scatter-brained paragraph? That's my long-winded excuse for making this review brief.
The setup is as basic as it gets, for this series. The Final Destination formula was already very well-formed by this point. Hell, both movies that followed it would use the same framing device. This time around, it's high school student Wendy Christensen who gets the "star premonition" treatment, this one depicting a horrific accident on an amusement park roller coaster. And...it's pretty damn cool, just like everything that James Wong has concocted since the first movie (and this time he's back in the director chair, after taking Part 2 off to do whatever former X-Files writers do in their spare time). It's NOT as wicked awesome as that highway demolition derby from 2, but it's still pretty cool.
You know where it goes from here. Death needs to be avenged, Tony Todd guest appearance, "we need to fool death" conversations, yada yada yada. When it comes to these movies, it's all about the execution.
Fortunately, I happen to think this movie has a bit better execution than the second movie. That one made the mistake of bringing a past character back and making the character an integral part of the proceedings again. No one gives a shit about the human element in movies like this, but it DOES help when you have Mary Elizabeth Winstead in your movie. Along with Katie Cassidy, Miss Winstead is one of the closest things we have to a modern-day scream queen. She's done plenty of horror movies, and puts off this great "girl next door" vibe that hearkens back to Jamie Lee Curtis quite well. It's no different here. An impressive feat, since the script doesn't give her much to work with.
And that's all I'm going to say about the characters in Final Destination 3.
If you're watching these movies, you know what the money scenes are. We get another decent batch of death served up here, with my favorites being the back of a dude's head getting sliced off in a restaurant drive-thru, the nail gun death (so awesome), and that bit in the tanning salon, truly one of the more cringe-worthy things you'll ever see. I also get the impression that the ending was actually meant to make this the final movie in the franchise, but alas, the temptation to have death FLYIN' AT YA IN 3D was too much to resist a couple years down the line.
Anyway, this is a pretty middling flick. It delivers everything you expect to see in these movies and absolutely nothing more, although it does have Mary Elizabeth doing her thing. I'm also going to credit her for the impressive box office take that this movie enjoyed, as this movie pulled in more than $100 million in pure profit from its slight budget. Kids, there's your reason why we got a couple more movies out of this admittedly slim formula.
Rating time for this movie. ** 1/2 out of ****. It's not going to do anything to blow you away, but Mary Elizabeth Winstead is worth an extra 1/2 * on her own.
Now for a few more words about the whole Final Destination series in general. Much credit to James Wong for coming up with this concept, because it definitely made a fantastic movie for the first go-round. I will say, though, that these movies get repetitive mighty quick, starting with the first sequel. When this movie came out, I didn't even bother seeing it in theaters for that very reason. However, three years later, I drove 80 miles to see the fourth movie in 3D because it came out the same day as Rob Zombie's Halloween II and I wanted that movie to get crushed harder than Dean Ambrose at WrestleMania at the weekend box office. It did, but that flick was pretty damn tepid. But the fifth movie? Friggin' awesome, with amazing kills and a finale that generated an audible "oh shit" from yours truly. If I could retroactively grade the movies, I'd probably dock Part 4 down to ** but keep everything else the same.
Now let's just pray we don't get any reboots.
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