THE Final Destination!!!

Honestly, I don't know what happened to this series. It started off promising and then fell off a cliff real fast.

To recap, in 2000, the first Final Destination movie directed by James Wong was released. It was a fun piece of mainstream horror and while not great, it was still pretty darned entertaining. It was followed by a sequel a few years later, directed by David Ellis, which is not only my favourite movie in the series, but I'd even put it up there with some of my favourite horror movies in general. It was funny, campy, and the kills were gory and creative. Not only that, but the story took a unique approach to connecting with the first movie. It was a solid package all around and a great popcorn horror movie. Then came the 3rd movie with the returning Wong, which was not so great. With this 4th movie, I had high hopes going in. You see, it was directed by Ellis who had a strong showing in the 2nd and plus it was going to be in full-length 3D, what could go wrong?

Well, a lot of things. This movie isn't a reboot to the franchise, I think it's still considered the 4th movie in sequence, but I guess the big wigs didn't wanna stick a 4 at the end, instead they opted to stick the word "THE" to the beginning instead. It's as if they're telling you the other movies you saw may have been Final Destination movies, but this one is THE Final Destination movie.

The movie follows a group of young pretty looking people at a stock car racing show. The main dude gets this premonition of a huge car crash and a crapload of people dying, so he and his friends bolt out as well as others by accident. Anyhow, the premonition becomes true, killing dozens and dozens of people, but the survivors find themselves picked off by death one by one. Death is following its design.

So what I did like was that a lot of the kills were still fun. The first "real" death had me laugh out loud, and so I thought we were headed for a happy place for the rest of the movie. Basically, they insert a Rube Goldberg device into a scene and at the end of it, you get your kill.

I would have been fine with the story if the main dude didn't utter a piece of thought in the last scene of the movie. I'm not going to say what he said, but basically if what he said were true, then it just destroys the whole idea and premise of the previous three movies. Knowing this little last bit of detail sort of ruins any semblance of hope we have for any of the characters of this and past movies. In fact, I would have totally been okay with this movie were it not for this last minute. Way to go!

Also, you know a movie is going to be cheesy when the actors in the movie look like other actors. For instance, the main dude looks like a cross between James Franco and Joseph Gordon Levitt, his best friend looks like a mix between Chris Evans and an 80's teen comedy heart-throb, and the two girls look like generic attractive girls. The best part is that there's a security guard character that tries to help them unravel the mystery behind the deaths and he looks like Bubba Gump from Forrest Gump! Wait, let me IMDB this... well smack me silly and call me Susie, IT IS BUBBA GUMP! What a career!

If I had to rank the series right now, from best to worst, I'd go 2, 1, 4, 3. This is a skippable movie and with so much good horror movies released this year, you're not missing anything if you choose to pass on this. Til next time, later geeks!