By Ulrick Casseus '07
Reviews Editor

Any time the third installment of a movie comes out, there is cause for concern. The chances of making a movie that compares to the first two installments, let alone be a good movie in its own right, are slim to none. For every Star Wars III: Return of the Sith, there are ten Matrix Revolutions. The creators of the Final Destination franchise decided to roll the dice one more time and release Final Destination 3. That was not such a bright idea.

I assumed that the writers would add something new to the story in order to have any chance of meeting the success of the first two films. Granted, the second film did not measure up to the first film, but it wasn’t scratch-your-eyeball-with-a-paper-clip bad. After watching FD 3, I was glad I left my paper clips at home.

The basic premise of this movie is the same as the previous two: protagonist shows off her clairvoyance skills and sees the gruesome death of her and her friends, protagonist flips out and prevents her and her friends from becoming part of the disaster envisioned, the envisioned disaster happens, and Death collects on the rain checks of all those who were supposed to die in the disaster but didn’t because of the protagonist’s warning. I was hoping to get some type of curveball with the basic plot, but there was none. In addition, as expected in any teenage horror flick, the characters were cliché: there was the innocent protagonist, the protagonist’s closest friend, the spoiled rich girls (with fake breasts, of course), the nerd, the goth outsider, and the jock. In this movie, not only was the jock a meatheaded, foul-mouthed badass, but he was also black. I surmised that the writers had an oh-so special death planned for him (I was right). If you’ve watched FD 1 & 2, you know that the protagonist and his friend will be the last to survive, so the movie essentially consists of people getting killed…nay, slaughtered, until the protagonist finds a way to outsmart Death once and for all.

Although the basic plot of this movie was similar to the previous two, this story was afforded a slight revamping. In this movie, the protagonist takes advantage of modern technology and uses the images from her digital camera to figure out how the next person that is supposed to die will meet his or her doom. Since everyone in the theater already knows the plot, this was the only way for the writers to add suspense to the movie. Once the protagonist figures out how the character is supposed to die, she tries to intervene and break Death’s cycle. The key word is “tries.” I still feel for the guy whose head was next to a metal fan in his snapshot.

The death scenes in this movie are the only improvement over the two previous Final Destinations. The death scenes are much more elaborate, which is apparently a staple of all slasher films (see Jamie Kennedy’s rant on sequels in Scream 2), and are gratuitously gory. In fact, if a character would have been disemboweled by a hand blender, he would’ve gotten off easy. Apparently, the time the writers could’ve spent reworking the plot was spent trying to figure out the best ways to make the audience vomit their nachos. Throughout the movie, it is painfully obvious that the writers knew that the audience would only be interested in the graphic deaths of the characters, so they played around with how victims would ultimately meet their doom, which resulted in long, drawn-out death scenes.

As the final credits scrolled on the screen, all I could say was, “Umm, OK, at least the sheer awfulness of this movie didn’t cause a riot.” I wouldn’t be able to look my fellow law students in the eye and tell you all to go watch the movie. You would be better served to save that $8 for the bar during Spring Break. However, if you do feel the intense need to watch a film with a bad plot and utterly disturbing death scenes, rent Banned from TV Parts 1, 2, and 3.