Final Destination movies are the guiltiest of guilty pleasures. The combination of sexy, dumb teenagers and over-the-top executions makes for one helluva gory good time. What sets apart Final Destination is the increasingly clever ways in which teens are “grounded”. It’s like watching someone play Mousetrap but instead of a cage coming down it’s fifty knives or a rogue semi. Add in that there is no face to the mayhem, just a force. These movies may adhere to the same formula over and over again but it’s a good formula. How many other movies have Stifler being decapitated by train shrapnel? Not nearly enough.
Final Destination stars 90s teen staple Devon Sawa as Alex Browning, who right before boarding a plane on a class trip to France receives a dark premonition. Everyone on the plane will die! His panicking leads to several students and a teacher being escorted off the plane and then what fucking happens? Everyone gets exploded. Apparently, this pisses of Death something fierce, leading to each survivor being killed in a horrendous Rube Goldberg-like fashion. Can 90s teen heartthrob Devon Sawa continue to cheat death? Or will he reach his “Final Destination!”
Final Destination began life interestingly enough as a pitch by writer Jeffrey Reddick for The X-Files. Inspired by the 1996 TWA Flight 800 crash, Reddick wrote a 14-page script entitled “Flight 180”. Though series creator Chris Carter turned it down it was taken under the wing of X-Files’ writers James Wong and Glen Morgan. Wong and Morgan turned the script into a feature and with Wong at the helm made the first in a series of supernatural, gore-filled, teen murder-ramas.
The characters in these movies are dumb. They aren’t any smarter or less cliche than any other teens in your typical horror movie, which is I like these movies so much, everyone stupid dies. Final Destination is a series where you root for the bad guy, or bad force anyways. Story is irrelevant as long as we get to see plenty of “Smashy, smash, gut, guts!” Which I believe is actual dialogue from the film. Final Destination has four sequels and surprisingly, this one is starting to look like the worst. With improving effects this is a series that is only as good as its kills and each time they’ve upped the ante. It’s still my dream to marathon all these films… Or is it my premonition?
Devon Sawa has a vision: His career is over.