The Final Destination 3D

The Final Destination can only rank as a complete imaginative failure. Selling bland fatalism to kids, it's the work of crooks. The original movie had the best premise of any slasher film: Making the killer death itself, while teenagers question the uncertainty of their own mortality. Rather than expand the mythos, the sequels (and this is the worst of them) let go of the seriousness, devolving into a string of countdown-to-extinction gross-out gags. The main character this time is named Nick. The movie doesn't know whether he and his friends are students, hold jobs or won the lottery. Don't ask so much about stick figures. By removing any social context, The Final Destination is irrelevant. The concept of high school students contending with death and immortality gave parts one and some of three their gravity. Director David R. Ellis, of Final Destination 2, has made the dumber, more gruesome series entries. If the freeway collision that opened part two hit too close to home for some viewers, nothing here quite crosses that line of reality. Still, the light tone of a scene where two young kids watch their mother killed by lawnmower shrapnel is misguided. Besides, Ellis ruins his shocks with too many CG effects. Having directied the energetic B-movie Cellular, he approaches The Final Destination exactly the wrong way. Dying isn't the biggest concern; it's already brain-dead. –Mark Palermo