FINAL DESTINATION 3 Reviewed by Harvey S. Karten
New Line Cinema
Grade: C
Directed by: James Wong
Written by: Glen Morgan, James Wong
Cast: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Ryan Merriman, Kris Lemche,
Alexz Johnson, Sam Easton
Screened at: AMC Empire 25, NYC, 2/12/06 During my years teaching in urban high schools, I ran into many kids who were wonderful. I’d have adopted them in a heartbeat. (OK, that’s going too far.) Others were, at best, irritating, but few were as pesky as the nitwits in James Wong’s movie, “Final Destination 3,” possibly the final stand of a trilogy about teenagers who are young and stupid, though in one case blessed with the power to foresee tragedy. In “Final Destination 1,” a youngster joining others on a field trip to Paris, gets a vision of sudden death, creating more mayhem than a class of junior high school kids with a day-to-day substitute teacher. This time, something similar occurs, except that the instrument of death is a roller coaster rather than a plane. Trajectory, similar; plot, formulaic; the genre horror, the audience, laughing at the appropriate points--those being the incidents that find the victims crushed, beheaded, punctured, and fried, albeit not in that order. The order of things is, however, important. The conceit is that a group of high school buddies climb into a doomed roller coaster ride, each destined to die in the order of seating. Those who panic and leave their seats before the engine starts escape the fate of those who were not prescient enough to bolt. The youngsters who get off the car before the accident are nonetheless destined to die in the order in which they were sitting. The kids in the front meet horrible deaths shortly thereafter, while the others are mutilated in due time, up to five months later. There’s no escape from destiny. Dylan Thomas notwithstanding, death does indeed have dominion. Wendy Christensen (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is at the center of the story, a control freak who frowns regularly and is the type who would be called “scaredy cat” in elementary school and “control freak” by those who take introductory psych in senior year of high school. She warns her classmates to get off the roller coaster before it took off. Those who ignore her die moments later. Those who follow her advice are on borrowed time. Death is delayed for Kevin Fischer (Ryan Merriman), Ian (Kris Lemche), Erin (Alexz Johnson, and the most obnoxious of the lot, Frankie (Sam Easton). All of these new graduates will find their lives a lot less boring than they were in social studies class, but sometimes boredom is the lesser of two evils. Much is made of Wendy’s digital photos, each of which contains a visual of the method of death that each will suffer, but some of her classmates need more convincing. Though these are callow youths, they nonetheless find Wendy’s explanations illogical, urban legends. Of the group, one guy working in a loading plant actually sets up a philosophical discussion about death’s meaning, insisting that any one of the gang sitting near the back of the roller coaster could kill himself immediately, thus frustrating the morbid force that insists on doing away with the group in consecutive order. The dialogue is banal, but then, talk serves merely as quick intermissions between the gruesome killings. Each time blood spurts, expect the audience to roar approval, not so much because the victim is obnoxious but because there’s something funny about violent death, particularly when it’s not your own. While some of the killings are shown but in a second or so edited away, the best involves the fate of two bimbos who close themselves into coffin-like boxes in a tanning salon and who die slowly and painfully, as Robert McLachlan’s camera shows the girls turning tan, then red, then as a mess of blisters and bile. Ariel Velasco Shaw is the star of this movie. He is the visual effects supervisor whose design for a deadly roller coaster ride and his use of Rube Goldberg machinations leading to other killings are on target, as is Shirley Walker’s appropriate score. Rated R. 92 minutes © 2006 by Harvey Karten
harveycritic@cs.com Member: NY Film Critics Online | 
