Daily Skiff

For the love of God, never visit the city of Indianapolis, which is where I assume "The Final Destination" took place.

It's full of rogue ambulance drivers, shoddily constructed racetracks and escalators and construction safety standards that would make an Occupational Safety and Health Administration agent take a nail gun to his own head. Worst of all, the city's denizens are constantly being killed by the items mentioned above.

At least that's what "The Final Destination" would lead you to believe.

Let me begin by saying this: If you're looking to be genuinely terrified by a film, you're barking up the wrong tree.

If you want to be entertained by terrible screenwriting and inventive death scenes, this movie's for you.

In the film's opening, Nick O'Bannon (played by Bobby Campo) saves his friends and some innocent bystanders from a deadly (and hilarious) race car crash at the local speedway because he had a premonition about the deadly accident.

Long story short, since the survivors cheated death, death comes after them and tries to kill them in the order in which they escaped the accident. Eventually, Nick and his girlfriend Lori (Shantel VanSanten) find out about death's evil plan and try to break the chain by saving those next in line to die.

They fail miserably, and eventually they all end up dead.

The deaths usually happen as a result of some comically tragic assortment of bad luck, almost always involving a loose nail or cracked pipe that somehow ends up creating a large-scale death trap, like a killer car wash.

Some guy was killed by a hot tub that fell into his hospital room after a careless doctor upstairs left the water running, thus weakening the foundation.

One woman whose name isn't important because she existed in the movie solely to die took a high-speed rock through her eye right after telling her children, "I've got my eye on you." Said rock was launched from under a lawnmower about 100 feet away and took her down a la the Nazi sniper from "Saving Private Ryan."

Hunt (Nick Zano), the protagonist's best friend, has his insides ripped out by a broken pool drain as his spleen and intestines are shot out of the pool pump all over the deck of his fancy yuppie country club.

To make matters worse, and highlight the film's terrible writing, Hunt is never again mentioned by the other characters in the remaining 30 minutes of the movie that follow his death. I have never seen a plot hole this wide in a movie before. My five-year-old nephew has enough sense to tie up loose ends when he tells me stories about Optimus Prime and Megatron, so how come a team of highly paid screen writers can't at least mention this guy again?

Yes, the acting and writing are terrible, and yes, the death scenes are thousands of times more hilarious than scary. However, if you don't mind movies from the "so bad it's good" genre, you'll be hard pressed to find a better time at the theater this year.

Article Tools