James Wong and Glen Morgan returned to the Final Destination franchise with the third installment, which some consider the high mark of the series. Final Destination 3 replicated, almost to the exact number, the box office performance of the first film ($54 million domestic, $112 worldwide). Narratively speaking, though, it is the first film in the series to consciously break from the characters and events of that initial film.

The opening premonition sequence stands out as one of the best the series has to offer. I personally still prefer the highway pileup in Final Destination 2 for its visual cohesion, but for the frenetic pacing of the rollercoaster disaster, Wong does succeed in making the action mostly clear and suspenseful. The scene plays out as all the others do: One person sees a strangely detailed vision of a horrific accident that kills dozens, then comes to and causes a massive scene. A few people get pulled away from the site of the oncoming accident as a result, setting the stage for the specter of Death to come and right the cosmic scales.

Inexplicably, a character who survives the rollercoaster discovers the crashed plane and the entire plot of Final Destination, so that the characters can get an easy jumpstart on understanding what is happening to them. The attempt for these sequels to make the first film something of an urban legend never works for me. And the guy here knows way more than would make sense: in a later scene, he somehow knows that to beat Death the order people are supposed to die must be disrupted. What newspaper gave him that information? Plus, in this case the unrealistic amount of knowledge about the previous films is redundant, considering our hero Wendy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) also has her supernatural camera to show her the puzzle of Death’s “design.”

Wendy’s conspiratorial photograph-based theory may be accurate within this story world, but, boy, is it a bonkers theory. The photographs she takes during the carnival document the characters who are destined to die during the course of the film. This is true to what we already understand about the lore of this franchise. But she also believes photographs just generally tell the future, and her examples are a line artifact on the forehead of Abraham Lincoln in the last photograph he ever stood for and a shadow of a plane on one of the twin towers.

The screenwriting in these films just isn’t all that subtle. Wong and Morgen return to their “theme” from the first film, which is to just scatter the word “control” over their script without any decent interrogation of the concept. At one point, the word control disappears from a fast food drive-thru kiosk. Spooky.

What’s more, the script willfully decides when characters do or do not decide to exercise what control they do have. The main characters choose not to look at the pictures that will give them clues to their impending deaths, simply so that there is something to reveal to the audience at a time that is more pertinent to the story. When this information is revealed, a character looks terrified in the direction of what he thinks will kill him, when he has feet which could easily walk him in the opposite direction. It’s simply very bad writing.

At the very least, the series fully embraces the comedy of its central premise. The set pieces are adequately tense, but they also are overtly humorous. The tanning salon, the runaway truck, the aggro footballers weight-lifting. It’s intentionally comical, and it mostly functions successfully as comedy. It helps that the death sequences in this are some of the most memorable in the franchise.

On a final note, I find it hilarious that menial figures of authority are always mindlessly the bad guys in movies like this. The manager at the carnival literally says, “No one gets off the ride” after someone goes ballistic about how the track is broken. The thought of someone going, no, you will stay on this rollercoaster of certain doom and there’s nothing you can do about it, is hilarious.

Final Destination 3: C+

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As always, thanks for reading!

—Alex Brannan (Letterboxd, Facebook)