I watched Final Destination and I liked it. 3/5
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Death’s Got a Spreadsheet
Final Destination is the kind of movie that lives in your brain longer than it probably deserves to. Not because it’s a cinematic masterpiece, but because it takes one very simple, very sick idea and commits to it like a teenager who just discovered Nine Inch Nails and hot glue.
You cheat death, death comes back for you. That’s the whole thing. No demons, no killers in masks, no ancient curses. Just pure, faceless inevitability, chasing you down with whatever’s closest to hand. A slippery bathtub. A stray shard of metal. A clothesline. Death is basically MacGyver with a grudge.
The film starts strong. A high school class is heading to Paris when Alex (Devon Sawa) has a violent premonition of the plane exploding. He freaks out, gets dragged off the flight along with a few classmates and a teacher, and then — boom — the plane explodes just like he saw. For a few minutes, the survivors think they’ve just dodged the worst trauma of their lives. Then the “accidents” start.
It’s a hell of a concept. And in 2000, it felt fresh. The idea that death itself could be a villain, not in a metaphorical way but as a literal force of nature, was weirdly terrifying. There’s no face to punch. No rules to follow. No haunted house to burn down. You’re not dealing with something evil. You’re dealing with something inevitable.
A Strong Start That Slowly Unravels
That plane explosion? Still holds up. The film earns a lot of goodwill from how visceral that sequence is. The buildup, the way it plays with time, the panic spreading down the aisles, it’s one of the better “disaster in progress” scenes of the early 2000s. But once the group lands and the survivors start dying one by one, the movie starts to wobble a bit.
This is a film where the plot doesn’t really progress so much as it loops. Someone dies. Alex panics. He figures out some vague clue about “the design.” Then someone else dies. Rinse and repeat. The characters spend most of the runtime trying to out-think death, which is fun in theory but gets a little repetitive in practice. Especially since most of their dialogue consists of mid-tier high school philosophy and constant yelling about fate.
Devon Sawa does what he can with the material. He’s twitchy, sweaty, always five minutes away from a meltdown. Which is fair, considering his classmates are getting choked, burned, and decapitated in ways that feel less like accidents and more like death has a very dark sense of humor. Ali Larter’s Clear (yes, her name is Clear) is fine, mostly there to be The Girl Who Believes Him. The rest of the cast is cannon fodder.
The Death Scenes Are the Real Stars
Let’s not pretend we’re here for the emotional arcs. We’re here to watch death do gymnastics. And in that sense, Final Destination delivers. The deaths are creative, mean, and often ridiculous. A bathroom slip leads to a slow-motion hanging by shower cord. A computer monitor explodes into someone’s neck. A train splashes brain matter on a window. It’s like watching a Grim Reaper who really enjoyed Home Alone.
What makes these scenes work is that they’re built with tension. You can always see the pieces moving. The dripping liquid. The spark from the socket. The fan that starts to wobble. The audience gets to play along, scanning every frame for what’s going to be the thing that sets it all off. The suspense becomes a kind of game, even if the payoffs sometimes veer into cartoon territory.
The film never explains the rules too much, which I actually respect. Death isn’t some demon you can outsmart with a chant or a relic. It’s just waiting for you to get tired, distracted, or cocky.
A Fun Ride That Doesn’t Quite Land
This is a 3 out of 5 for me. It’s clever, but not as clever as it thinks it is. It’s scary, but not consistent. And it has moments of real inventiveness buried under a script that leans hard on tropes and teenage angst.
But for all its flaws, Final Destination is undeniably entertaining. It taps into the fear that everything around you could turn on you at any moment. And it did something horror films hadn’t really done before. It made death the villain, not just the outcome.
It’s a movie that’s more fun to remember than to rewatch, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth seeing. Especially if you like your horror mean, mechanical, and just a little bit stupid.