PLOT: Death comes back to settle scores when a group of teenagers leave a doomed roller coaster at the last minute because of a premonition. One by one, the kids who should have died do so in circumstances predicted in supernaturally enhanced photos.
With 150,000 people dying worldwide every day -- as a needless-to-say-doomed teen says in Final Destination 3 in a burst of expositional dialogue -- you wouldn't think Death would have time to use his imagination.
But apparently as a young Reaper, he spent a lot of time playing with the board game Mousetrap(TM) -- so enamored is Final Destination 3 with things that fall onto other things, dislodging balls that roll along shelves, knocking over liquids that spill onto appliances that short out and electrocute naked teenage bimbos. And like that.
That's one thing you can give the Final Destination series of teen scream films. They bring a fresh enthusiasm to the hoary genre of killing teenagers for the entertainment of teenagers.
And with FD3 being helmed by original director James Wong, it hews almost by reflex to the original's template. For those who don't know, the plot of the Final Destination films involves a bunch of teens avoiding their fated death because of a premonition -- a plane crash in 1, a car crash in 2, a rollercoaster disaster in 3.
But Death, like OSAP, does not let debts slip through his bony fingers.
There's a perfunctoriness of plot (in FD3, one of the coaster crash survivors actually Googles the events of the first movie so the characters are clued into Death's intent in short order). But the suspense comes in guessing how Wong will bloodily frame the unavoidable.
Stealing from the Goosebumps book Say Cheese And Die, the plot device in this movie is a digital camera, which, in the hands of yearbook girl and self-described "control freak" Wendy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), starts showing pictures of people with weird lines through them and objects that aren't there.
Each one is supposedly a clue to how Wendy and her friends are going to die. And a lot of time is spent by Wendy and her now-dead girlfriend's jerky boyfriend Kevin (Ryan Merriman) trying to figure them out (as if the "how" is more important than the dying itself).
None of this matters. The target audiences of FD3 is there for the inevitable -- artfully, ahem, executed. The coaster crash is actually pretty cool. It's such a primal fear, you wonder why more movies haven't used it.
And in the aftermath, heads are a big target: crushed, sliced, nails shot through. In each case, the character is given a scene to show he or she is, y'know, really annoying, so it's kind of okay. In fact the "we hate this guy" scenes are so badly interwoven with death objects rolling and falling, that it's undeniably mordantly funny.
At least the audience I was with laughed more than it screamed.
BOTTOM LINE: Original Final Destination director James Wong returns to the teenager-killing series to create an installment that is exactly as machine-like in execution, sardonically funny and gory as the original -- with a truly scary rollercoaster disaster for openers, and plot points borrowed from the Goosebumps story Say Cheese And Die. Not bad teen scream fare.
(This film is rated 14-A)
