Final Destination 3

It’s obvious that there was no point to this sequel any more than there was a point to the previous one. It’s also obvious that these films have no purpose whatsoever except to serve as body countdowns in which the “takedowns” get progressively gorier. It’s also, utimately, obvious that there are people who are entertained by this. However, I sometimes have to imagine that movies like these were made to give critics like me something very tempting to trash.

Trashing this film, in and of itself, is too easy. What I’m more interested in is why people continue lining up, like zombies, to see the same tired formula over and over again. My job as a critic isn’t merely to trash movies, but (ideally) to encourage moviegoers to broaden their interests, challenge themselves and see something they might not have seen before. In this case, the best I can do is try to elucidate the myriad reasons why this film ought to be an insult to your intelligence and your pocketbook.

If you didn’t see the previous two, the premise is quite simple. People who were “intended” to die but somehow managed to escape death are marked with a curse. They will begin dying in the order in which they would have, but didn’t. So, why isn’t everyone on the planet cursed? I’m sure at one time or another, some guy, perhaps in Hoboken, New Jersey, got a paper cut that barely missed a critical artery. Every day people have near misses. Well, the film doesn’t think that far and, apparently, the force of death is highly selective.

The movie is directed by James Wong, who also directed “The One” starring Jet Li — another film rife with inexplicable paradoxes. The title sequence, complete with sped-up shots of carnival rides (sorry, no blurry heads or creepy carnie types this time…), shows the ball of fate bouncing its way through one of those fortune-telling contraptions.

Wendy Christensen (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is a high school girl attending her graduating class party at the local fairgrounds. Don’t ask me how the hell a high school goes for a thing like this; imagine the insurance bond costs! As a (belated) sign of the times, she has a digital camera that becomes her guide in this maze of insipidity. The pictures she takes provide clues to how she and her friends will die. Of course, seeing the magnitude of obscurity in the clues only vindicates the viewpoint of those who maintain that prophecy is tantamount to throwing darts at a wall — one out of a few thousand has got to hit the mark.

Each of the movies in this series starts the same way. The protagonist witnesses a chain-reaction sequence of events leading to horrifying deaths, only to wake up and realize it was either a dream or a premonition. Once people start dying, it’s definitely a premonition. If the point is that you can’t predict the future until it’s too late, how is Wendy any different from the rest of us?

Then there’s always a process of discovery that connects to the existing mythology surrounding either prior events or, as in the case of the first “Scream” movie, the self-aware reasoning behind surviving an emerging pattern of deaths. In this case, the boyfriend of one of the first to go, Kevin Fischer (Ryan Merriman), imparts upon us the procession of events from the preceding film. He, of course, read about it on the internet.

The other sage wisdom comes from, naturally, the gothic duo of Marcus (Dustin Milligan) and Erin (Alexz Johnson). It’s usually implied that such outsider characters are masters of the occult, but I think there’s a reason they’re played out as atheistic empiricists here. Inherently, every horror film is a morality tale in which the point is that: a) amoral behavior (e.g. being a goth) is a sin for which the punishment is being impaled repeatedly by a nail gun guided by the hand of fate, b) god has a plan for everyone, even if it involves frying the local teenage tanning-bed bimbos.

The gothic twosome’s scientific views act as really just a buffer to slow down impending doom, if only just long enough to stretch out the running time of this movie to fill 93 minutes.

There’s absurdities to be sure: A gratuitous boob shot sequence involving two girls in a tanning salon who end up as corpses. The funniest transition since “2001: A Space Odyssey” involves the match cut from the two flaming tanning beds to two matching coffins. That’s kind of the tone of the film. Every gory death tries to out-gross the preceding one — to laughable proportions. It reaches a point of terminal absurdity where every deathtrap involves a confluence of so many implausible and precisely timed factors that it seems as if Rube Goldberg himself is Mr. Death. However absurd, it would be utterly painful if the film had no laughs whatsoever.

This movie falls into a new trend of splatter-fest horror films that aren’t about the protagonist winning. Somewhere along the slasher films of the 80’s, some market research must have shown that people are rather fascinated by body counts… So, naturally Hollywood got the idea (perhaps inspired by people who fast forward through the filler in porn) to skip character development, exposition, logical plot development, scene composition, and basically every other film element and strip it down to a body count. Today, that body count is heavily assisted by visual effects that probably helped avoid an NC-17 rating. My thought on this is that computer effects have the ability to show gore without it looking real. A head is smushed like a watermelon, but in a way that defies physics and leaves no trace except for spatters of blood.

I wondered if anyone else noticed that every time someone got killed in Wendy’s presence (and most of them do), she’d get splattered with bits of their blood. Is it a coincidence that, as I said, horror has been reduced to pornographic violence? Is it then doubly coincidence that the cutaways to Wendy’s face as it receives spurts of blood, again and again, bear striking resemblance to degrading money shots in pornographic films? I was also reminded of slapstick comedies where the pie-in-face, soot-in-face, or debris-in-face gag is used way past the point of total burnout.

It’s not worth comparing this to, say, psychologically-creepy films like “The Sixth Sense.” Granted, different genre, and likely to not entertain people who are intentionally seeking out a grotesque series of deaths, but if you want to see something unsettling I’d suggest “Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist,” directed by Paul Schrader. I recently watched that on DVD and, in contrast to the Renny Harlin reshoot, I have to say I was genuinely disturbed by the possibilities and implications far more than revelation and exposition. There are only so many times a person can be provoked by a fakeout musical cue before they’re completely underwhelmed by the actual horror when it does reveal itself (i.e. “Boy Who Cried Wolf Syndrome”). “Dominion” actually reaches into the inner depths of the guilt that tortures Father Merrin, and shows us how “evil” unfolds in the world — preying on guilt to the point of emotional paralysis.

Movies like “Final Destination 3” only toy with the idea of guilt for a few seconds, before marching right back to video game mode as a way of telling us that people who produce these pictures believe you, the viewer, are too stupid to want to be entertained by more than gimmicks.

This isn’t the dumbest film I’ve seen in the past year (that would be “Into the Blue”). It’s quite unambiguous in its base function as a video game-style pileup of dismembered carcasses. What does bother me is the idea that our education system has produced people capable of being entertained by something as lacking in originality, substance and style as this — a trilogy of episodes so symmetrical in structure and content that missing one (or all) would be entirely inconsequential to your understanding of what will happen.

Then again, it’s possible, however implausible (especially if you know how to use the internet well enough to reach this website), that you may have been living on a remote island since before “Friday the 13th” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street” premiered… Even if that were the case, I would hope you had at least a few hundred other things to catch up on before you have time to even contemplate seeing this movie.

Final Destination 3 • Dolby® Digital surround sound in select theatres • Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1 • Running Time: 93 minutes • MPAA Rating: R for strong horror violence/gore, language and some nudity • Distributed by New Line Cinema