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Movie Review: The Final Destination |
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SPOILERS AHEAD!
I haven't done a review in a while, and I ended up seeing The Final Destination with my girlfriend today in 3D, and well, there are spoilers ahead. If you plan on seeing this movie, you have this one chance to back out of the journal and ignore this, otherwise, look ahead and see what I thought of the movie...and also look at the ending I came up with in it's place.
The Final Destination is claiming to be the final movie in the series, which is good, because clearly the movie is only following a pattern, I could sum up the entire movie in one word: predictable. The movie begins at a race track, obviously, if you're interested in this movie in the first place, you know what's going to happen: a the main character, in this case Nick, has a premonition that everyone is going to die, and immediately flips out and in the chaos of his freak out, he, his friends, and a group of random people end up outside the speedway as disaster strikes, ensuring they survive. For an entity as powerful as Death, Death itself must be completely bored to begin this chain of events to kill off everyone he let survive in the first place. Obviously, he did not have enough to do.
To be fair to Death, I suppose taking lives the old fashion way is tiring, and to shake it up, you may want to add fun and excitement into a job that might get stale after a while, so through a series of events much too complex to say here, he ends up killing the survivors one by one. Of course, the infamous "chain of destiny" is brought up and the lowly pathetic mortals think they can break it, and of course, in the end, think they have only to die horrifically. The chain, then, seems unbreakable. The plot is thus: Nick flips out in the speedway, the survivors of the speedway accident try to save themselves, but after 4 movies, you think they'd react quicker to this whole scenario. The deaths are gruesome, evident by the presuming of a guy's guts being ripped from his a**. Yes, I said it, a guy's guts are ripped from his butthole. You never see that happen, but you can easily presume that's how it happens, and he's little more than an empty shell at the end of the scene.
If you're a guy, and you like blood, you may enjoy this movie, there's also a short sex scene in there with a cute girl's breasts bouncing up and down as she's riding one of the main character minutes before his guts are strewn around the pool area. Like I said, spoilers ahoy, if you wanted to see this move and are angry I spoiled it, well, that's completely on you now, I warned you.
In 3D, it's rather neat and spectacular, a few times I nearly freaked when I saw an object aimed straight for my head, making me feel like I was the cameraman in a documentary of death, which was nice, but it didn't cut away from the feeling that I had a premonition of how the movie was going to end. One scene was really good though, in fact, I had to hold myself back from yelling in suspense and stop rooting for the main character, Nick, to avoid being thrown out. Nick has a second premonition, this one is not like the snippets of clues leading to the deaths of the other, like the first premonition in the movie, it details everything. Nick, seeing the black guy, George (whom I really liked as a character), die by being hit by an Ambulance like the second premonition dictates, he rushes to a movie theater to save the girls, one his girlfriend, and the other a friend of his girlfriend's, before an explosion in the movie causes a real life (movie) explosion. Death has a sense of irony to time the explosion in the movie's movie at the same time of the explosion that kills people in the theater.
Nick rushes to the theater to stop the explosion, but he doesn't go to get the girl's, which makes this the most unpredictable moment of the movie, sadly. Into the construction zone, where OSHA is clearly unheard of (in fact, the entire movie is essentially an OSHA-training movie, someone give them a call, tell them to start using this movie to show them how no safety standards leads to death), and in heroic fashion, goes to stop the entire fire that causes the big boom which not only kills the theater patrons, but half the mall as well. Never easy, Nick is shot at with a nailgun and gets his arm impaled on a beam where flammable liquid is heading to a roaring fire, where should it hit, will result in the big boom. The hero grabs a long beam, and using heroic strength, starts the sprinklers with the large beam which the tip is on fire. The fire is out, the mall is saved, and they celebrate two weeks later.
Now, OSHA really would love the ending, because the hero, Nick, tells a construction worker to fix the scaffolding which is not screwed tightly, the worker mentions he'll get someone on it, but never does, and just as the main character realizes that the series of events leading them to the cafe have been put in motion from the start...resulting in the scaffolding falling, a semi swerving to avoid it and crashing into the cafe's building, killing the last three survivors.
Predictable? You bet, the whole movie is like that, truthfully, it's a gruesome and gory movie, pretty fun in the end, and if you like that kinda stuff, give it a rental at least when it comes out to DVD and Blu-Ray, because it was fun, but you better not expect much from it.
Now I had mentioned, above, an ending I'd rather have seen, which would have been pretty amazing in itself, and given the audience a sense of "WTF WAS THAAAT?!". The ending, in my way, goes like this:
The trio of survivors are sitting down at the cafe, Nick realizes that the entire survival was predestined from the start, as the movie ending goes, but a man in street clothing enters the cafe, holding a map of Paris, the character is Alex Browning, of the first Final Destination movie, who survives the end of the first film and is killed between the first and second movie. This character, which would have been a cameo by the same actor of the first movie, would be looking at a map showing Highway 180 (that number is truly loved in this series), he looks up to the trio, as the character turns to see a Semi-Truck coming for them as the original ending dictates, but Alex holds out his hand, a scythe appearing in his hand, slicing the heads off the three (now dead) trio of the movie. In a puff of black smoke surrounding Alex, a robe surrounds him, and a black hood covers his eyes, leaving a sinister smirk on his face, in another puff of smoke, Alex disappears and the trio's heads fall off. A flash, the three characters suddenly drop over dead onto the table, the semi-truck stopping inches from the glass, and the movie ends.
The movie is already supernatural, go all the way and here you go, that's my ending. Alex, of the first film, is shown to be Death itself. The why and how could be left to the viewer, as a matter-of-fact, the whole scene with Alex could be up to the viewer to decide if it was real or not. That ending, in my opinion, would be much better than the predictable ending of the trio dying at the hands of the semi crashing through the window. What causes their death when "Alex" arrives to take them? No explanation is given, and that's where the fun of speculation is given.
All in all, The Final Destination IS predictable, but fun, for a gore fan like my girlfriend, even she was squirming in her seat, though I enjoyed it, the predictability killed the entire enjoyment, which was sad, because if you used my ending, I would've flipped and been like "WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?!!" and then written a better review for it. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted, not a bad 2 or so hours.
That was my review of The Final Destination. Until next time, this was the one and only, Salem Wolf. Later.
Salem Wolf · Tue Sep 08, 2009 @ 12:45am · 0 Comments |
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