Final Destination 3

"You may never return from Devil's Flight."

We've hit the midpoint of the franchise. Luckily, it's widely considered a high point as well.

This review contains spoilers!

This movie scared me for over a decade before I actually saw it. Back in 2005, my dad took me to see King Kong in theatres. It was the first time that I was allowed to go see a PG-13 movie, so this was very exciting, especially since I was decidedly not allowed to go see Revenge of the Sith six months prior.

I was nine years old and completely unprepared when the trailer for Final Destination 3 started. It absolutely terrified me. For years, I would remember distinct images of swords spinning and slicing through the air towards someone lifting weights, and of two girls screaming inside of tanning beds.

Now, as a much older adult, I don’t know if I would call Final Destination 3 particularly scary. It’s certainly a horror movie, don’t get me wrong. But it’s not scary in the same way that a movie like Halloween is.

Instead, it strikes a balance between the emotional fallout, grief, and survivor’s guilt that comes from the situation with the fun, elaborate, brutal kills that are the hallmark of the series. It arguably strikes the best balance out of the entire franchise.

The first half can really be attributed to the characters and the actors portraying them. Mary Elizabeth Winstead is simply great as Final Girl Wendy. Her screams and tears after her premonition feel viscerally real in a way that none of the other main characters manage to hit. She also has great chemistry with Ryan Merriman, who plays Kevin.

Kris Lemche also has great screen presence as Ian, and I wound up enjoying his character a lot more this time around than I had in the past. His worldview is just fascinating, and I love tracking his arc throughout his scenes.

Really, all of the characters felt like real people that I definitely knew back in high school. Okay, maybe not Frankie Cheeks. I didn’t know anyone like him. But everyone else? Especially Ashley and Ashlyn? Absolutely.

And everyone had a bit of unexpected depth to them. It would have been too easy to make Ashley and Aslyn just vapid, self-absorbed idiots, but they try to include Wendy in things and are pleasant to basically everyone they talk to.

I want to circle back around to Wendy and Kevin’s relationship, though, because it’s so different from what you normally see. They’re not friends. They’re not dating. They’re not exes. They’re that odd pseudo-friendship where you hang out together just because you’re friends with the person they’re dating.

And while I think that Kevin does genuinely like Wendy at the beginning of the movie, Wendy doesn’t. To be fair, Kevin isn’t presented in the best light at first, given the whole upskirt picture thing. It’s not surprising that his girlfriend was planning on breaking up with him.

He quickly endeared himself to me, though, with how kind he was to Wendy when she was scared both in the line and after she had her premonition. There was absolutely no hesitation when he defended her against Lewis. I genuinely rooted for him and wanted him to survive.

The kills, as a whole, were all wonderful. Wendy has a line about Death feeling cruel, and that is definitely apparent in how our hapless survivors are picked off. It’s the small details, like Ian’s hand twitching or how the camera lingers on Erin’s face after the nail gun goes off.

Of course, I need to highlight the kill that traumatized me twenty years ago: the tanning beds. Besides the logging truck in Final Destination 2, Ashley and Ashlyn are arguably the most iconic kills in the franchise.

It’s just nightmare fuel, plain and simple. You don’t even need the fire. Just being trapped, naked, as it slowly cooks you alive is bad enough. You can’t touch anything without it burning you, but you’re forced to because it’s such a small, enclosed space. It’s absolutely brutal, and then it breaks that tension with a genuinely funny match cut to their coffins.

I love it. It’s a perfect encapsulation of the tone that works so well throughout the movie.

There are definitely some flaws, namely with the larger, overarching story. There isn’t really one. It’s really just a sequence of Wendy and Kevin trying and failing to warn people that they’re about to die. Occasionally, they’ll say that Wendy has control issues. And by occasionally, I mean seemingly every other scene. (I know it’s not that often, but it feels like it.) It never really builds to anything, with the final set piece arriving abruptly and without much fanfare.

Final Destination 3 was written by Glen Morgan and directed by James Wong, both of whom reprisal their roles from the first movie. There is definitely some… favoritism going on. I don’t know how else to describe it.

The script repeatedly brought up the events of the first movie while almost completely skipping the second one. The only reference to Final Destination 2 is a single image, and that’s only used to support the idea that photos can be used to predict deaths. There’s no reference to the fact that someone had a vision, or that the survivors were then killed in a series of accidents.

It’s almost like it never happened, which then also leads to small moments of dissonance like when Ian theorizes that Wendy could save the other survivors by killing herself, therefore messing up Death’s plan in a very permanent way.

Now, Ian is very clearly just being a jerk, and the acting from Winstead in that scene is lovely. But Final Destination 2 proved that such an idea is impossible. Eugene fired a loaded gun into his head six times, and it didn’t go off. Death wouldn’t let someone go early.

It’s silly and it’s nitpicking, I know. But it’s just a little weird.

I’m also going to complain about the premonition itself. I really liked the rollercoaster crash. I thought that the set design for the line queue was amazing and felt like a real queue. I liked that they shot a lot of it practically, including strapping cameras to a real, genuine coaster to catch those reaction shots of everyone on the ride.

But the whole crash hinges on Frankie’s camera wrapping around the tracks in a semi-ridiculous manner that just doesn’t seem like it would naturally happen in a million years. But then Frankie gets off the ride! He never drops his camera! And sure, I know the people will say that his camera was incidental and that it was really the hydraulics that ruined everything, but come on. That’s a cop out.

Still, Final Destination 3 is definitely the one that I can see myself rewatching the most regularly. I’m so glad that it’s as good as I remember it being.

Random Thoughts

Tony Todd voiced the Devil in Devil’s Flight and was also the voice of the subway PA at the very end.

This takes place 6 years after the first movie.

Texas Battle wins the award for the most fun name in the cast. He was also in one of my favorite guilty pleasure horror movies, The Task.

... Wendy really did take horrible quality pictures for the yearbook. They were so blurry!

The DVD came with a cool “Choose Your Own Adventure” bonus feature that included the ability to just never get on the rollercoaster in the first place.

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An Honest Fangirl loves video games, horror movies, and superheroes, and occasionally manages to put words together in a coherent and pleasing manner.

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