Final Destination 3: Critic Reviews

It's an escalating contest of can-you-top-this brutality, with each death staged as the final link in a Rube Goldberg chain reaction.

It's more dead teenagers and lunatic determinism in this grim third installment of the enjoyably preposterous Final Destination franchise.

At its heart, this second sequel is standard slasher stuff, though director James Wong does rise (or maybe sink) to the occasion with grisly staging.

With a premise as cavalier as this, perhaps director James Wong could have found a tone more original than post-Wes Craven cynicism. Instead, he panders to viewers, allowing them to take gleeful comfort in the destruction of the stupid and doomed.

Week in and week out, horror movies cheat us, so it's wonderfully cathartic to watch a bunch of kids cheat death in what turns out to be the best installment yet in the Final Destination franchise.

The notion of butchery as a spectator event notwithstanding, there's an almost admirably workmanlike quality to the way co- scenarists Glen Morgan and James Wong set up their characters for carnage like so many fleshy bowling pins.

After a fiendish start, filmmakers James Wong and Glen Morgan approach their task with all the subtlety of a hammer to the head (or a knife to the gut, or an ax to the back).

Final Destination 3 manages to push all the requisite buttons and then some.

The problem with FD3 is since it is clear to everyone who must die and in what order, the drama is reduced to a formula in which ominous events accumulate while the teenagers remain oblivious.

You can't cheat death. (But apparently you can cheat audiences over and over.)

All we can say is: Death be not proud. If you have to work this hard to take down these dim-witted kids, you don't deserve to be a cosmic force.

Gore fans will doubtless enjoy the film, which could spin off several more sequels. After all, Death is the one villain you can't ever kill off.

If this film makes money, and it probably will, there may never be a final Final Destination. And that is the most disturbing thing about this movie.

Granted, nothing here is going to go down in history as a horror classic. But as far as dead-teen flicks go, this is one pretty lively affair.

A desultorily plotted affair that feels less like a thriller than a homicidal checklist.

Keeping this series of black-comedy skits fresh is a challenge that the writers don't always meet, and their expository scenes need to be nail-gunned.

Might this be the final Final Destination? Don't bet on it.

As a horror flick, Final Destination 3 is literally laughable.

If you're a Final Destination fan, it's unlikely that #3 will disappoint. If you like horror/thrillers with plenty of cartoonish blood and gore, this will hit the spot.

The plot's pretty lame, the dialogue is downright hokey, and the characters are a bore, but somehow Final Destination 3 (an oxymoron if there ever was one) still delivers a certain degree of over-the-top amusement.

Even Hostel showed more respect for the dead

The film starts to pick up after it begins borrowing liberally from The Omen, even more liberally than the film's two predecessors which, as freak-accident horror films, are by definition Omen clones.