Final Destination (2000): A Vague, Shapeless Glob

I'm not one to glibly dismiss an entire genre or subcategory, but I can't recall with complete honesty the last time I saw a truly great teen movie. I know, I know, Final Destination is rated R, but it has all the personality of a Boy Meets World fan club that might meet at your local Burger King. All of the problem-solving skills, too. It certainly has no problem crafting far-fetched, gruesome, and unfortunate deaths for almost every teenager involved, but it has a hard time grasping why any of them are happening in the first place. Too much of this movie is unconfident and unrewarding, a far-fetched and narratively imprecise gauntlet of cliches. Perhaps concreteness is too much to ask for in a movie about premonitory visions of impending death, but I often found myself wondering what exactly these characters were trying to do, to say nothing of more pressing questions like how? Why? This movie has far too much trouble justifying itself to do more important things, such as answering any of the questions it raises.

That's not to say that everything about Final Destination is bad. The editing in this movie is excellent, striking enough to stand out yet restrained enough to avoid drawing attention to itself; one particularly fun match cut quietly transforms a boy's alarm clock into a flight board at the airport. On a more transcendental level, Final Destination does an extremely good job of making life seem truly fragile. We take for granted that we'll live to see the sun rise in the morning when tomorrow is not, in fact, guaranteed to us. If enough small things go wrong in this movie, someone will die, and I sometimes caught myself wondering exactly how close I've come to falling victim to a scenario as cartoonishly unfortunate as some of the untimely demises portrayed here. I understand that this is the draw of the movie, but Final Destination feels extremely uncertain in some really unsettlingly cool ways.

Nevertheless, this is where my positive comments about this movie end. I won't water it down - Final Destination contains some of the worst acting I've seen this year, and it's December. The idea of assembling a group of relatively inexperienced teen actors to make a movie doesn't even sound good on paper, and it translates to woefully insufficient results. None of the characters in this movie are truly distinguishable from one another, and that's a big problem when poor-quality performances are the rule rather than the exception, not that there are any notable exceptions. Still, this issue remains a sideshow to the biggest problem with Final Destination, which is that it never breaks out from under the thumb of its undefined, pie-in-the-sky antagonistic force. There's nothing in this movie for our cast of Nickelodeon TV graduates to fight against other than a vague semblance of an idea that the deaths of their friends and colleagues are somehow connected. Most bad movies are simply movies without ideas, but Final Destination almost seems like an idea without a movie.

Let's say that these deaths are entirely unconnected, even though it's probably apparent to you by now that nothing could be further from the truth. Why are these characters making the decisions they do? How are they going to stop this unseen antagonist? It's not so much that I didn't know why to root for these characters so much as I didn't know how to root for them. The idea of an unknown force connecting a series of deaths is intriguing until it becomes apparent that the filmmakers lack any real ideas for why anything in their movie is happening at all. Making matters worse is the fact that beating this unseen enemy becomes the goal of our teenagers. But how exactly are they going to do that? It's not like the movie knows. I guess they have to get lucky. If the real weight of this movie rested on something measurable, I could have seen myself liking Final Destination a lot more than I actually did. But too much of it seems like a vapor, an unsure wisp of smoke blown from one cool setpiece to the next.

In addition, its need to kill or threaten to kill every member of its cast becomes virtual self-parody as the methods of untimely death become more and more far-fetched. Just about everything in this movie happens because the premise demands it, and the longer its runtime wears on, the more unintentionally parodic it becomes. We're floated the possibility of a chapter two by the end of the movie, and I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I'd be more than happy to find out what's causing all of these deaths to happen. On the other, I wish chapter one were efficient enough to find the answer to that question on its own. Theatrical ideas aren't enough to carry a movie to the finish line, and much of this movie unintentionally writes its own eulogy. I can't decide if the prospect of a sequel sounds more like a promise or a threat.

Final Destination - 4/10

Isaiah 55:8-9