David R. Ellis | 82 mins | Blu-ray | 2.40:1 | USA / English | 15 / R
The best thing about The Final Destination is its title, because turning the series’ familiar name into a definitive article for the final entry is really quite a neat move. Sadly, it was a hit and they’ve made more. Why it was a hit… God only knows.
For starters, the story (such as it is) is a complete and utter rehash of the plot of every other film in the series. The only thing on its side is efficiency: it races through ‘plot’ scenes in a quest to find the next set piece. For example, the Rules are explained to this all-new cast because they Google “premonitions” and find out what happened in the previous movies. The overriding sense of familiarity makes for kind of depressing viewing. Previous films tried to find new twists on the rules, ways the cycle might genuinely be broken, etc, whereas this seems content to merely move from one death to the next. Aside from creative ways to kill people, literally the only new idea is that the premonition-haver sees two people die at almost exactly the same time and can’t remember who was first, meaning instead of traipsing to warn the next person they have to find two people. And that’s it.
Production values are low too, featuring very cheap CGI and very poor acting. I’d say both are below the standard of US network TV filler, so for the fourth entry in a fairly successful big-screen franchise that seems even more woeful. I know it’s only Final Destination, but still… The cast aren’t helped by the woeful screenplay, but I don’t think they could’ve enlivened a better one either. They’ve clearly been cast just for being Young and Pretty, but surely there are some Young, Pretty people who can act?
The focus is clearly on the deaths — at 11 it has the highest of the series, and with its short running time that means there’s a fatality every seven minutes. They’re also very gory, more so than in previous films I’d say, but they’re not commensurately more inventive. There’s a very thorough line in misdirection at times, but the whole enterprise feels painfully lacking in creativity. I’m not sure some of them even make sense. But then do they need to? Similarly, there’s some customary low-rent-horror-movie completely-gratuitous nudity too, which I’m sure delighted teenage boys even more in 3D.
None of the deaths matter because nothing is done to make us care about these characters, or even be broadly interested in them, unlike the best of the earlier entries. So there’s zero tension, zero emotion, just elaborate death after elaborate death. It’s one of the most hollow films I can think of. It may even have been better if they’d ditched the attempts at a plot and gone for a series of vignettes in which, unbeknownst to one another, the survivors were bumped off in order. That’s basically what this film wants to be anyway. At least it would’ve been something different. And shorter. And when you want an under-80-minutes (before credits) film to be shorter… oh dear.
The 3D factor was a large part of the film’s promotion, and it makes full use of stereo visuals in exactly the way you’d expect a schlocky horror to. Problem is, it’s so designed for 3D that some of it doesn’t work in 2D. It’s not just the usual array of stuff flying at the camera for no reason — 
that’s a sure sign it was meant for cheap 3D thrills, but otherwise fine — here, stuff pokes straight out. That means in 2D you see, say, the flat end of a pole, with absolutely zero sense of depth. This happened with one trap in Saw 3D, but in The Final Destination it keeps coming up. It might not sound like a serious problem, but again and again it jars as you try to work out exactly what’s where in the very flat straight-on 2D rendering. Maybe it’s good that 3D films are so thoroughly designed for their intended medium, but I’m not convinced.
As mentioned, this was sold as the final Final Destination — hence the definitive-article title — but it was a surprise hit (thanks in no small part to the 3D, back in the Avatar-hype era when it guaranteed anything a significant boost) and so the series has continued. What’s perhaps most odd, however, is that it makes no serious attempt to bring the whole series to a close. Sure, #3 ditched any links to the first two with a brand-new cast as well, but you’d think, knowing this was The Last One, they’d try to bring it full circle somehow. But clearly not.
Then again, I’m not sure anyone involved could have if they wanted too. The evidence for that is on screen: some of it is unbelievably boneheaded. “Where’s Lori?” “I dunno, I’ve been calling and texting all afternoon, she won’t pick up her phone.” Oh, maybe she’s, I dunno, in the film she told you she was going to see in the scene before last! Dear God.
Elsewhere, one character starts talking about déjà vu before getting killed in the same way as the first film’s most famous death. I suppose it’s meant to be Meta and Funny, and maybe it kinda is, but again the CG is so cheap that the half-trained eye will spot an effect is about to happen, and the manner of death once again doesn’t really make sense. Later, we learn that shopping mall sprinklers can instantly extinguish all fires — handy!
I could go on. I have half a dozen more examples in my notes. But no. It’s so woeful that it’s kind of frustratingly bad — you want someone with half a brain to come along and make the film work.
There’s a somewhat amusing way to judge the Final Destination series: its posters and/or DVD covers; and, specifically, what they tell us about the decreasing importance of character to the franchise. You see, the first prominently features head shots of the central cast (albeit half turned into skulls). The second offers either blurry head shots or full body shots, reducing their recognisability. In the third, the cast are still there, but reduced to near-facelessness seated on a roller coaster, often upside down. And by the fourth, they’re not even there at all. It’s true that Final Destination has never really been about the characters — it’s about how they die — but it’s also true that the more attached you are to them, however superficially, the better (as it were) their deaths are. Perhaps it’s just a coincidence that the characters, deaths and films get weaker at about the same rate, or perhaps each really is connected to the others.
There’s potential in the concept of the Final Destination films, but clearly it’s either limited or the people in charge don’t know how to exploit it, because after making two quite-good films they’ve turned it into a repetitive, stale, uncreative, formulaic disaster. And there’s now a fifth too, and a sixth hasn’t been ruled out — surely it/they can’t be any worse than this? Based on form, maybe they can…
The Final Destination is on Film4 and Film4 HD tonight at 11:05pm, and again on Friday 21st at 11:10pm. Because I’m sure you really want to see it now.
This review is part of the 100 Films Advent Calendar 2012. Read more here.
The Final Destination featured on my list of The Five Worst Films I Saw in 2012, which can be read in full here.
In the wake of highly successful franchise launches for 
which 
Adapted from a novel by best-selling author Michael Connelly, The Lincoln Lawyer seemed to appear out of nowhere and garner an uncommonly high amount of praise. I’m glad that intrigued me, because, while not a revelatory experience, it’s certainly worth your time.
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen McConaughey in anything (nothing I remember, anyway), but my impression has been he’s not all that. Here, though, he nails the slightly-smarmy-but-kinda-likeable street-wise defence attorney Mick Haller. He’s buoyed by a quality cast: Ryan Phillippe is eminently plausible as a rich kid used to getting his own way, while the likes of William H. Macy, Marisa Tomei, John Leguizamo and Bob Gunton offer typically consummate support.
after languishing in development hell for 20 years, he recently paid Paramount $3 million for the rights to his most prolific character. With said character being the half-brother of Haller, and that Lincoln Laywer sequel in development, maybe Connelly’s work is destined to become the Marvel Cinematic Universe of crime/legal film adaptations. This could be the time to get in on the ground floor.
Nic Cage does the 
Only in that stuff flies at the camera and whatnot. You can indeed tell it was made for 3D, but that doesn’t mean it needs it. Indeed, the poke-the-audience stuff aside, none of it suggests it would look great in 3D — for all the pointlessness of cinema’s new money-spinning format, it can add something to the vistas in a film like 
As noted, director Lussier does not have an inspiring CV: he started with numerous straight-to-video sequels, then a big screen sequel-no-one-wanted (even with Nathan Fillion in it) in 
I must admit to not being at all familiar with the work of H.P. Lovecraft. I know the name, of course, and the titles of some of his stories, not to mention being aware of the array of well-known fans. Aside from that, I’ve only encountered his work through its influence — there’s some stuff in the 
The marriage of low-budget and silent film style is one made in heaven, particularly when you add in the dedication of the makers. They built impressive props, ingenious sets, and employed model work in various inventive ways, all to execute a story that includes a cultist swamp orgy, a mysterious island, a sea battle, and a skyscraper-sized monster. Some online reviews have criticised the effects, but those people are quite frankly idiots. This isn’t meant to be slick CGI — it’s re-creating lo-fi early film techniques, and (aside from one or two rough-round-the-edges spots of greenscreen) it all looks fabulous.
I have no idea how closely it hews to Lovecraft’s original, but there’s a layered stories-within-stories approach (I think it gets four deep at one point) that is difficult to pull off with clarity, but never falters here. Christopher Nolan would be proud. It also effectively builds a sense of uncanny mystery; not outright scares, but a kind of disquieting unease. It’s my impression that was absolutely Lovecraft’s aim too, so another job well done.
Let’s establish one thing right away: this is unquestionably an inferior version of Fritz Lang’s masterpiece, 
4) It’s mostly dubbed into English. The bits that aren’t have been re-shot. Primarily, there’s a phone call between the police commissioner and the minister, which is really quite poorly performed — watch out for an unintentionally comical bit with the wrong end of a pencil. These two actors are also edited into another scene, a large meeting which their characters attend, and it’s glaringly obvious where Lang’s work begins and ends and the basically-shot bits (flatter angles, simplistic sets) have been dropped in. The director of the English re-shoots isn’t specifically credited, but it certainly wasn’t Lang: Fischer’s examination of M’s export versions informs us that it was the localised version’s “Supervisor”, Charles Barnett.
There’s no way anyone would reasonably recommend this variation of M over the original, but it does hold interest as a curio. It may leave one wondering how and why this practice of exporting films — where multiple versions in different languages were shot at the same time, rather than dubbing/subtitling later — died out. Cost, I imagine. Despite producing interesting asides like this, it’s probably a good thing it did.
Paramount had a burgeoning franchise on their hands in the early ’90s with adaptations of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan novels. He first appears in 
Ben Affleck is Ben Affleck, which means a lot of people won’t like him but he’s OK. Morgan Freeman brings instant gravitas to his role, though it’s not his most likeable or memorable part.
Chatroom is born of — or, at least, partly formed around — trying to find a viable way of depicting the world of online chatrooms on film. Putting on film this world it As It Really Is — people sat at a computer typing at each other — might work well enough for a single scene in 
in this environment is also truthful. There have been many reviews that are completely dismissive of this facet of the film, leaving me to wonder if they were written by people who haven’t used or experienced such things. It’s a shame, then, that the film’s degeneration into a thriller hides the arguably-worthwhile potential to explain to such people what that online world can be like for people/kids using it.
Despite a strong-ish start, perhaps the whole second half of the film is a wobbly mess; not directionless exactly, because by then it does know broadly where it’s going, but it doesn’t do much to suggest to the viewer that it has a real goal in mind. Character motivations and relationships feel as if they’ve not been fully thought out, or at least not fully brought together on screen. Some threads take inexplicable jumps; others aren’t adequately explained or justified. Occasionally it’s Nakata’s direction that overdoes things, for instance laying the soppy “this bit is emotional” music on thick when Matthew Beard’s performance could easily carry a particular sequence.
The aforementioned Matthew Beard, perhaps the least recognisable cast member (his 
Consensus holds that the work of once-acclaimed director M. Night Shyamalan has managed a near-perfect trajectory of decreasing returns. I’m not talking about box office — I have no idea (or much interest) in how that’s gone for him — but quality, starting with supernatural chiller 
Chunks of it seem to be missing, conveyed through clunky voiceover rather than on-screen action. The first rule of screenwriting — literally, the first — is Show Don’t Tell, but Shyamalan does exactly the opposite.
I wouldn’t call myself a Shyamalan apologist, but I think he has at times suffered harshly at the hands of critics and audiences disappointed that he’s never re-reached the heights of The Sixth Sense (though, personally, I prefer 
Michael Mann is arguably best known for his modern, urban, slick, intricate crime thrillers — films like 
Should we long for a Director’s Cut, then? Maybe that would be an improvement, but I’m not convinced it would be good per se. You see, the film doesn’t just stick to giving us Nazis vs Whatever The Keep Contains, oh no. First the SS turn up, led by a Properly Evil Nazi, played straight by Gabriel Byrne. Escalation, great. Then there’s Ian McKellen as a professor drafted in to make sense of the keep’s mysteries. Also great — even the Good Nazi is going to have to die, right? Who better to root for than a saved-from-a-concentration-camp Jewish professor.
There are plus points, but they all come with a commensurate downside. The creature is well-realised at first, with some nice animated effects that are more effective than much of the over-cooked CGI spectacle we’d get today. The more we see of him, however, the less power he holds — he ends up essentially a very tall man. OK, it’s a bit better than that makes it sound, but the mysterious billowing smoke was spookier. The film on the whole is nicely shot, with some real standout moments of cinematography. But slow-mo and a smoke machine both get overused by the end, lending many of the visuals a tacky ’80s edge.
One thing the film never manages to be is remotely scary. It’s not aiming for cheap jump- or gore-based shocks (although there is a little goriness, it’s quite light; triply so by today’s standards), but it doesn’t manage any significant senses of dread or creepiness. As noted, early on it seems to be heading in the right direction — even the secluded mountain village, nestled in a harsh landscape but with greener-than-green grass and garishly painted houses, and towered over by the foreboding slab of stone that is the titular structure, is an uncanny start — but it never makes good on the promise.
I would love to join their ranks, because there are numerous exciting ideas and moments of quality filmmaking to be found here; but I won’t be, because there’s too much muddled dross packed in around them. The result is that quite-rare thing: a decidedly mediocre film that I’m actually glad I’ve seen. But, unless someone wants to hire me for that remake, never again.
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