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What it's about:
Nick O’Bannon (Bobby Campo) has a vision of a terrible disaster at a racetrack, and he persuades his friends to leave seconds before it happens. After the crash, those who followed Nick and avoided certain death begin to die one by one under mysterious circumstances. Nick and his girlfriend, Lori (Shantel VanSanten), desperately try to discover what is happening while their friends drop like flies.
What we thought:
The Final Destination series of disaster-horror movies should be renamed Accident: The Movie or feature in adverts for life insurance, because it's made up solely of a number of ludicrous mishaps and some barely adequate special effects. The wisp of a story in this fourth installment is exactly the same as the other previous three, and this rather ruins the ending since we’ve seen it all before. As all horror fans know, you can’t cheat death, so why bother trying?
The acting and the script are woeful, but would you really expect anything better? These movies are all about how novel each unrelated death is, and The Final Destination definitely has its moments, albeit fleetingly.
The best bit comes early – the massive race track disaster which sets the whole story in motion, and happens in the first 10 minutes, providing some lovely cartoonish splatters and body mutilations, worthy of a young Peter Jackson. The downside to this is that the next hour or so never reaches the same level of gory thrills, and even at a brief 82 minutes in length, the time drags.
The cinema chose not to screen the 3D version to the press, so I can’t really comment on how good that aspect of the film is. However I can say that there are frequently objects flying at the screen – car tyres, flaming debris, human limbs, metal spikes etc, so I’m sure it’ll be a treat for anyone who wants to see the same tired gimmick over and over again. Others might find the latest Pixar movie Up makes better use of the 3D technology.
The Final Destination's one gimmick dried up as soon as the credits rolled at the end of the (admittedly fun) first movie back in 2000. But this latest rehash is uninspired and pointless. Even in 3D there would only be about three awesome minutes in total, and that's not worth your time, money, or sanity.
