Final Destination 3
Grade: C-
Year: 2006
Director: James Wong
Writers: James Wong & Glen Morgan
Genre: Horror
Rated: R

WE WISH IT WERE FINAL DESTINATION

You gotta' hand it to Death. No longer is he in the business of straight-up killing people. Now he's got to make it fun as well, because having the job of taking lives is just another mundane job of the biological bureaucracy.

Six years ago the main character of the first film and a handful of others frantically departed a jetliner minutes before it exploded upon takeoff because he envisioned the catastrophe and wanted the movie to continue. Because the passengers were supposed to die Death comes for them in the order they would have perished had they remained on the plane.

Whomever's next on the list can be saved at the last second if someone else intervenes and pushes them out of the way of a moving freight truck. But alas, it's only a temporary reprieve as each original survivor gets their last desserts.

Exactly one year later the same thing happens to another group of victims in the sequel when the main character envisions a fatal wreck on the interstate and blocks the onramp with her car. This time they figure out Death is a little more forgiving and their lives can be saved if - and let me see if I get this right: a new life is brought to the world in exchange for one that left…or if the main character pretends to die but is brought back to life thus fooling Death?

Regardless, life must go on (and end) and five years after the sequel Death comes after another group of high school teens that look about 27. This time on a rollercoaster where one character explains: "You've got a greater chance of dieing on the way to an amusement park than at the amusement park."

No dice kid, no dice.

The one who gets the visions this time around, Wendy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), inexplicably figures out that the clues to how everyone will die are in the pictures she took with her Olympus for the yearbook. She remembers Flight 180 six years ago (although the events of the sequel are curiously ignored) and runs around with her friend Kevin (Ryan Merriman) trying to save the classmates who got off the rollercoaster with them.

And so the pattern repeats itself, just like it did in the previous films. To the film's credit, I guess, the deaths are more gruesome, bloody, and perverse then parts one and two combined. Most of the deaths are witnessed firsthand by Wendy and Kevin as they fruitlessly try to save their skeptical friends. "What Flight 180?" Kevin manages to have a pretty good sense of humor throughout the film, despite witnessing the brutal killings of his friends. What do you do when you have just seen five or six of your peers decapitated, sliced and impaled? Kevin literally goes to work.

So FD3's got the gore but of course that alone doesn't complete a good horror film. At least the Friday the 13ths and slashers of the eighties tried to be somewhat scary. FD3 is all about the payoff, and because a plain old kill is no longer satisfying by itself anymore, the camera must linger on a twitching body that has just been skewered by the unimaginable.

Splatter fanatics will be impressed by the body count, just as much as I was by the movie being able to get away with an R-rating certificate. I can only imagine the Unrated Director's Cut that will surely be released in a matter of months with special "never before seen footage" and director's commentary.

Not that I'm complaining, because I'm not, it's just that I prefer a little substance and veteran screenwriters Glen Morgan and James Wong give us very little to appreciate. Just listening to the pseudo-villain rap about Newton's Third Law of Motion makes us thirst for his impending demise…and that's just not right.