Fear of flying? Miss Final Destination. It's a terror trip about teens cheating death by getting off a plane before it crashes.
Finding your happy place on Flight 666 might be more difficult after viewing this concoction featuring the violent dismantling of a wide-body jet.
Phobic about flimsy spooky movie tactics? Avoid this obvious exercise in re-inventing the Scream formula, which mixes scared with silly in equal amounts of heavy-handedness, which leads to sporadic waves of apathy.
Which is too bad because there is a decent foreboding Twilight Zone feel to the James Wong production.
And Devon Sawa and Ali Larter make a convincing duo battling the unseen grim reaper cheated by the aforementioned bodies not counted on the doomed fly-to-France holiday trip.
Marked-for-payback are these doomed souls, who left the aircraft just before it pushed back from the jetway.
There is a live-alone teacher (Kristen Cloke). There is an arrogant jock (Kerr Smith), and his tart-like girlfriend (Amanda Detmer). There are two typical teen types (Sean William Scott and Chad E. Donella) and the weirdo adolescents defined by Sawa and Larter.
It is Sawa's dude who has the original bad news premonition, and it is he who figures out that death wants what it already thought it had.
Being an efficient but unseen monster, the slashes and bashes, the throttling and the beheading, all arrive through a series of horrific coincidences highlighted by that ominous, but oh so familiar, bit of foreshadowing breeze.
The subsequent death scenes seem slightly comedic and almost quaint, as one slip leads to another deadly pratfall.
Indeed, by the time Final Destination reaches its apparent exciting conclusion, snickering rules, not anxiety over who's next.
That may or may not be a good thing, depending on your mood and your expectations.
One thing is certain. Final Destination gets to where it's going -- which is nowhere near Horrorville, but just a few short blocks from Goofytown.
(This film is rated R)
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