| Overall Grade: |
B- |
|
| Story: |
N/A |
|
|
| Acting: |
N/A |
|
|
| Direction: |
N/A |
|
|
| Visuals: |
N/A |
|
|
Destination: fear
by CarlosC (movies profile)
Dec 16, 2007
7
of
7 people found this review helpful
A school trip to Paris is marred when one of the students (Devon Sawa) experiences a realistic vision of an airplane catastrophe shortly before takeoff. His subsequent outburst causes five other students and a faculty member to disembark before takeoff. But, to their horror, the airplane does explode shortly after taking off, leaving everyone bewildered, and somewhat suspicious of the boy who announced the explosion before it took place. They soon discover that their unexpected disembarkment from the doomed airliner means that they have cheated Death, and that Death is coming after them.
This movie deserves more credit than it got -- from critics and audiences, both. Perhaps, because it belongs to a genre -- the teen horror flick -- where innovation is avoided at all costs, everyone just assumed that this was merely another installment of 'I Know The Urban Legend that You Screamed Last Summer,' or some such. Instead, this movie is a smart, sexy little picture with a twist to its slasher technique. For one thing, there's no bogeyman. No Jason, no Michael Meyers, no hockey mask, nor white ghoul: We don't know what to be afraid of -- creepy, creeping toilet water or a knife rack? Additionally, the absence of the psycho killer removes also the "Scooby Doo" antics of most slasher films -- the guessing game of "Whodunnit" that we must predictably play in teenie thriller flicks.
Rather than the usual fare, FINAL DESTINATION tells us who's going to die, up front. We know that the seven survivors have a rendezvous with Death. The movie proceeds at a furious clip therefrom. Clocked at a tidy ninety seven minutes, this is not a movie that overreaches or overstays its welcome. Some of its sequences are particularly succinct. For instance, the opening action, at the airport, has a Hitchcockesque economy to its use of a visual montage presentation to achieve a visceral reaction of fear. Anyone who is afraid of flying would naturally be terrified by this sequence. Even someone with just a normal apprehension about air travel would find that anxiety manipulated to a low boil by the barrage of bleak shots of dreary looking airplanes, corroded airplane parts, creaking metal sounds, and so forth.
In the end, however, FINAL DESTINATION is just a teenie slasher flick -- above average to be sure, but not without its defects. We're not supposed to ask any questions with movies like this, but if we did, we would find a lot of loose ends with respect to the plot: some of them are pretty basic. For instance, the rules that the main character (Devon Sawa) is able to figure out about how to cheat Death are absurdly arbitrary (one of them relates to the direction of the blast from the explosion with spatial relation to the seating arrangement on the aircraft), which makes us wonder why Death would have to be bound by such Kafkaesque protocols. Finally -- and, most damagingly -- the film-makers decided to add an encore coda after seemingly resolving all the conflict of the plot as a final thump in the movie score, which may leave viewers feeling cheap and used after they thought that they had reached their "Final Destination."
(Carlos Colorado) |
My Public Profile 
