Final Destination 3 (2006)
Directed by James Wong
Written by Glen Morgan & James Wong

Though it starts out laughably implausible in a good way, it rapidly becomes laughably implausible in an irritating way. Now, the previous FD flicks were predicated on extremely unlikely chains of events transpiring, but in this one, the Rube Goldberg-esque deathtraps take far too long to set up, don't make any logical sense, and deliver almost no payoff. The gory money shots are probably worth the price of admission—I mean, you can't really complain about watching two nude girls fry in their tanning beds, or seeing a weightlifter have his head based in from both sides—but the plotting is about as subtle as the board game Mousetrap.

James Wong and Glen Morgan, two of the creative forces behind the good years of "The X-Files," continue a sad decline here, offering their non-fresh spin on the Kevin Williamson-Wes Craven self-aware horror genre, in which fake-looking stock-character "teens" speak and act as only fake movie teens do. There's the "statistic spouting outcast," the "shallow, dumb popular girls," the "bitchy younger sister," the "cool black athlete who has only white friends," etc. I've seen Mexican variety shows that had more nuanced characterizations.

This teen-horror template approach must be the laziest way to write a screenplay anymore … although in this case it's questionable whether they bothered to write the screenplay, since there is almost no logic behind any of the plot developments. How do the kids in FD3 realize that they have somehow stumbled across the same "curse" that plagued the plane crash survivors in FD1? By vaguely "using the Internet." Again: that's just plain lazy.

For what is supposed to be an out-and-out teen deathfest, FD3 is extremely talky, with long stretches of dialogue between each big death scene. It's almost like they didn't have the budget and/or the ideas to come up with any more of these elaborate death scenarios, so they just padded it out with interludes, hoping no one would notice. But come on, you don't go into a FD movie because you care about the characters. You only care that they all will die in pleasingly gruesome ways.

I also found myself rolling my eyes at the dumb "in-references," such as having a character named "Romero." I'm not sure why horror directors feel compelled to throw that kind of shit into their movies, but it doesn't serve the audience, except for the smug assholes who like to believe they're "getting" the movie more thoroughly than everyone else.

The DVD has a "Choose Their Fate" feature, in which at various points during the film, you are asked to choose what the character should do, and depending on your choice, there is a different playout. This is an admirable idea, though they don't quite have it down yet. Rather than genuinely altering the course of the movie, your "decision" will either just continue the actual movie, show you some kind of deleted scene or outtake, or show a deliberately different outcome of one of the "real" scenes. As a result, I'm not even sure whether I saw the "real" movie in its entirety.

Perhaps it is the case that the surprising enjoyability factor of the first two FD flicks gave FD3 a higher expectation factor than it could deliver upon. The death scenes were (though completely unbelievable) as satisfying as they needed to be, and the film does careen to a rather unexpectedly nihilistic ending. But I still got the feeling everyone involved was just punching the clock.

Loud Bassoon rating scale

Review by The Baronesse von Blau