3 out of 5

Directed by: James Wong

The post-Scream teen slasher / horror boom of the 1990s definitely produced – as with any trend in horror – its share of glut, but Final Destination gave off “something different” vibes. There wasn’t a main baddie; there wasn’t a lot of focus on teen drama – what was there felt rather shoehorned in – and there was a bit of campiness that skewed slightly older than the general demographic for these things, reminding of the tone of a monster-of-the-week X-Files episode.

Turns out there were reasons for those vibes: not only did the movie start as an X-Files script from Jeffrey Reddick, it was also handled by some seasoned X-Filers, via co-writers Glen Morgan and James Wong, with the latter directing as well. And befitting that, it wasn’t a teen flick even after being turned into a movie, focusing instead on adults, until that Scream-induced boom required the thing be refigured for the younger demo. Now, I while I can think of plenty of instances of TV-to-movie scripts and rearranged ages that’ve been great, Final Destination really only suffers from these adjustments. Though the seeds of the Rube Goldberg puzzle deaths were likely better allowed by a movie budget, their fledgling form here doesn’t really start to work until late in the flick, otherwise saddling things with a light supernatural aspect that would’ve been more enjoyable on a small screen. Also, while I’d say the first half is truly tense stuff, the aforementioned shoehorning comes slamming down thereafter to give us a romance angle out of nowhere, some jock / nerd aggression that doesn’t make much sense in the context of the movie, and a goofball stereotype who adds levity to the teen movie that this isn’t.

But stepping back: Final Destination uses a campy Tony Todd cameo (redundant?) to lay out the premise: you can’t cheat death. Alex (Devon Sawa), while onboard a ready-for-takeoff flight to Paris for a class trip, has a nightmare of the flight’s catastrophic failure, sending him into a panic, tussling with several other students and a teacher, and causing this select lot to get tossed off the plane. As they’re mostly taking Alex to task for this, their intended flight departs in the background… and catastrophically fails. Death, for these students and teacher, has been cheated. And soon enough, when these survivors start dying off in mysterious circumstances, it seems that death must set the books straight.

This is a super fun setup, lending an immediacy and inevitability to things that sends the teens scrambling for a solution, instead of just stabbing each other to figure out who the killer is. And the movie does get to capitalize on this, settling on a tell of a breeze or the appearance of water (like a leak) to clues us in on death shenaningans impending. While some death’s-a-comin’ steps beyond these feel unnecessary (e.g. a CG shimmer added to a reflection), they all work within that slightly self-aware vibe. Where it gets confused is when the script / movie tries too hard to make Alex into some type of precog, using zooms on completely random things in a scene, accompanied by spooooky music, to clue us / Alex into who’s going to be targeted by death next. Initially, this is all coincidence and cute, but once the movie passes the halfway point or so, the writing gets lazier and disconnected, with the imbalance of tone – mean-spirited horror; camp; teen slasher – making things especially muddled. The “solution” the filmmakers settle on is to ramp up the script with extra plot clutter. Committed performances from Sawa, and main female lead Ali Larter, cannot topple the leaden dialogue happening at this point, or some of the contrivances needed to convince us the teens still have a chance to survive.

But, again, the idea is a good one, and it’s also at this halfway-ish point that the kills start to feel more playful, setting up plenty of fake-outs to have us close our eyes and wait for a scream… only to reopen them and see our current target has struggled out of scenario A and landed squarely in even more ridiculous scenario B. It’s definitely a shtick that stands / stood out from the who’s-the-secret-murderer slashers, and combined with a very solid opening half, makes for a memorable, if messy, experience.