By Jeff Hartke, February 9, 2006

Aimed squarely at its target demographic, Final Destination 3 (FDES3) is a competent and amiable film, with a quirky sense of humor and enough gore to keep the splatter fans from grumbling. Young audiences looking for a fun popcorner will neither be disappointed or thrilled.


Welcome to Final Destination 3, the third in a series where a group of high school students cheat Death, who does not like being spurned. Mary Elizabeth Winstead (MEWIN) stars as a girl whose psychic premonition prevents her from boarding a runaway roller-coaster car, saving herself and a number of her friends. Death is apparently a personage rather than an event, and he does not appreciate the fact that these kids didn’t die on time.

Not one to waste any time, Death takes an active hand in pursuing them - and it appears that he has an elaborate sense of humor. It's kind of like a mystery. We know that most (if not all) the characters will die, in horribly messy sticky awful ways, and part of the fun is trying to guess exactly when, and how, they go.

As inevitable as Death is, an escape clause of sorts exists. If they can avoid him a second time, then they are reprieved. Clues on how exactly Death is planning each character's demise are found in the digital photographs Winstead took of her friends the night of the escape. The kids have to decode these clues and be in the right place at the right time, if they want to see another birthday. The audience is invited to play along with the characters to see when and where exactly the hammer will fall.

When that hammer does fall, it sends skull parts flying in glorious Technicolor. Despite the high splatter value, the small number of deaths and the underlying humor of the film keep things from getting too grisly.


Part of this is due to the delight Director James Wong takes in crafting what can only be called Rube Goldberg devices to kill off the characters. If you ever played "Mousetrap" as a kid, you know the type. A man rings a bell, which causes a dog to bark, which scares a cat who begins to run on a hamster wheel, which turns a fan that blows a toy sailboat across a filled tub, and so on until the conclusion is reached. As we see the different pieces fall into place, we know that something big is building, as in one scene that takes place in a warehouse home improvement center. Everything the camera lingers on could be the next murder weapon, and as we build new scenarios in our imagination things get worse and worse.

Unfortunately, none of this craft focuses on developing the characters, who are a bland collection of movie shorthand turned flesh. With the exception of Kris Lemche's fine performance as a bold Goth, the rest exist only to prop up the plot and/or die. This shortcoming keeps the film from being memorable. Unless you have sympathy for one of the characters, you will not feel the true thrill of horror, no matter how much you admire the set up.

Final Destination 3 opens in wide release on February 10.