2 out of 5

Directed by: James Wong

The original co-writers and director of the first Final Destination return to… not improve on either preceding film. Deciding to make a standalone film, unlike 2’s more direct ties to the original, director / co-writer James Wong and co-writer Glen Morgan essentially remake their former entry, ditching the wishy-washy tone for something purely teen oriented. And, well, everything is dumber as a result.

FD 3 follows the formula of the prior two movies: a teen (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) goes through a horrific accident that involves mass casualties, only to wake up at the moment of their death and realize the sight as a premonition of things to come. Said teen causes a ruckus, not stopping the accident, but preventing a handful of people from being caught up in it. Unfortunately, this messes with the universe’s grand plans – these folks were supposed to die – and so death decides to right matters, leading to elaborate Rube Goldberg setups that eventually off all of the survivors.

Though we piddle around with some “wow, 2006 was a long time ago” scenes of boys chortling about taking upskirt photos of girls and the girls just rolling their eyes and gossiping about breakups and etcetera -i.e. establishing that we’re not in the more somber setting of film 1, or the more self-aware kookiness of 2, and just joining the teen slasher club of having unlikeable leads – FD 3 does admittedly deliver a great variation on that opening accident, doing all sorts of ramp ups to a horrifying roller coaster ride. And there are some fun Rube Goldbergs thereafter, but I’ve kind of already mentioned the main problem: almost everyone in this film is either not very smart, or intentionally obnoxious. There’s hardly a reason to care, and so you just end up waiting for the kills – which is not an unacceptable way to pass the time in a horror movie, except there was promise in the other films of shaking things up a bit, making the downbeats with characters play better, and thus making the kills more exciting, too. It’s not that Morgan and Wong necessarily took the wrong notes from the franchise – I understand we’re all going to these things to see the fun ways the creators cook up for executing cartoonish violence – but it’s also disappointing to see it go down the most predictable route.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s character makes nice with the upskirt-taking boy (Ryan Merriman); people we don’t like get killed in creative ways – though I’ll add an additional snipe that Wong / Morgan seem to have a meaner edge to these scenes than FD 2’s creative team did, which also disengages me a bit – and eventually our teens try to cheat death’s plan once more, with… less than successful results. The premonitions the FD lead gets of upcoming kills are transmuted into predictive photos taken before the accident; there’s maybe an odd scene that suggests that such a photo could’ve stopped 9-11? But anyway, there’s the return of one of FD 1’s dumber aspects during the pre-death moments, in that the camera zooms in on very inconsequential details with music stings, trying to add ominousness to those details (and failing), and we don’t even get a Tony Todd exposition dump in this one, instead relegating it to upskirt boy having overheard about the events of FD 1.

Showing my lack of taste, I was sure this entry would end the franchise, but it made more money than the second one. Go figure.