The Final Destination (2009) Director: David R.Ellis

When you think of the Final Destination movies, they're not quite up there with the greats of cinema, are they? Citizen Kane, The Shawshank Redemption, North by Northwest...no. But you do expect entertainment, some jump out of your seats moments, a laugh and a spooky concept. Sadly, this fourth installment in the gory series is just SO dire, it has made me extremely angry. Are audiences really this stupid to enjoy shit like this? Why do we put up with such crappy movies? Am I missing the point?! Someone...please...educate me if I'm going so wrong here but I'm grappling with whether society is actually now so dumb we take what is thrown at us. Who would find this entertaining?!

I loved the first Final Destination - brilliant in its ideas, execution and gore. It was also very scary. Number two and number three were also very fun but The Final Destination really misses the mark. The acting is so wooden that you couldn't care less what happens to these people; they're just killing fodder. There is no storyline as such either; these characters accept their fate and try to break the circle of death. That's it. They don't freak out. They don't show any type of emotion. They just get sliced and diced or run about a bit.

And the gore - perhaps Final Destination has run out of ideas but part of the fun is guessing how people are going to die. The actual death scenarios here lack imagination and shock value; they're really very boring. Death comes in the form of a light breeze and some tools flying into someone's head or something. They're disappointly crud. When I see viscera flying at me, I actually want it to look real and I think part of the problem here is that it's all CGI'd and made for 3D. A couple get sliced in half at the speedway accident and it's just like a really poor computer animation. The earlier films are preferable where stuff did look a bit real and a bit gross. Horror is entering dangerous territory when they rely on CGI effects to replace proper gore and prosthetics.

With Final Destination 5 rapidly coming (opening sequence featuring suspension bridge carnage apparently), the people behind this series really need to buck up their ideas to make it credible and, well, scary again. FD's fate otherwise seems sealed...straight to DVD.

Here's the trailer...if you can be bothered.



1/5