Main cast: Bobby Campo (Nick O’Bannon), Shantel VanSanten (Lori Milligan), Nick Zano (Hunt Wynorski), Haley Webb (Janet Cunningham), Mykelti Williamson (George Lanter), Krista Allen (Samantha Lane), Andrew Fiscella (Andy Kewzer), and Justin Welborn (Carter Daniels)
Director: David R Ellis
The Final Destination is supposed to end the Final Destination franchise in a blaze of 3D glory, but something went wrong somewhere and the end result resembles some hot mess created by first year film students given free access to expensive special effect gizmos.
The story follows the same formula as the previous movies. Nick O’Bannon, his girlfriend Lori, and their bickering friends, the ex-couple Hunt and Janet attend a racing event in some cheap-looking stadium when Nick gets this premonition that they will all die in various hilarious, er, gory ways. Nick manages to get his friends and some stragglers out of the stadium in time, but you know the deal. Death doesn’t like being cheated, blah blah blah, so they all begin to die one by one.
I don’t watch this movie expecting high art, but seriously, the cast in this one is easily the most talent-free of the four movies. Were not for IMDB listing them as players in various bit parts in TV, I’d expect Bobby Campo and Nick Zano to be picked when the casting agent went to a first year drama class and asked, “Hey, who wants to be in a horror movie?” Mr Campo is awful here as he has zero facial expression on his face even when his friend dies before his eyes. Not even a grimace – he has absolutely zero emotion on his face. Even in a movie where none of the actors is expected to do much, he manages to stand out as a truly bad actor – that’s how awful he is.
But a bigger problem here is how the death scenes are now more comedic and ridiculous than scary. The movie isn’t aiming for humor, so most of the comedy here is unintentional. Where Death was once a creepy methodological accountant in the first two movies, killing off his victims with style, here the death scenes are sloppy and cartoony. This is an expensive movie that utilizes the mindset of a cheap B-grade movie, in other words.
The Final Destination comes off like a lame parody of the movies that came before it in the franchise. Let’s hope that this is indeed the final stop where the series is concerned, as the bottom of the barrel has been scraped.
