Our retrospective of the Final Destination series has reached its most confusingly-titled entry, The Final Destination. This is the fourth installment in the franchise. This was an odd era in Hollywood where studios occasionally got scared of sequels with numbers attached to them, so they simply dropped the number. Fast & Furious (the fourth one) came out the same year as The Final Destination (the fourth one), same with Terminator: Salvation (the fourth one). There’s also Rambo in 2008 (the fourth one). Some real tetraphobia going on here. See also: Rocky Balboa in 2006 (the sixth one), Saw 3D in 2010 (the seventh one).

It reminds me of the 2020s trend of studios splitting long blockbusters into two parts, numbering each part, then getting skittish and frantically renaming them. I think the Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part One thing directly impacted the film’s box office performance.

Immediately, The Final Destination sets itself apart from previous entries by (1) piping in some certified dad rock with Shinedown’s “Devour,” and (2) abandoning all sense of creativity in its deadly Rube Goldberg designs. In the opening sequence at the motor speedway, most of the little instances of objects interacting to slowly elevate the chaos are randomly established with little sense to continuity or cause and effect. Bolts start unscrewing for no reason. Concrete starts crumbling for no reason. A motor oil canister tips over for no reason. A mother forces her children to stuff tampons in their ears like earplugs, for…some reason.

Then, cars start exploding and horrendous CGI onslaught begins (filmed for 3D, so the awful effects fly right at your face!) It’s an abysmal sequence not made any better by flat editing that looks like it came straight from a Friedberg & Seltzer parody film. While the three films prior to this are no masterworks, the premonition sequence in the fourth film is a borderline embarrassment. It looks bad, it’s paced poorly, and the action is uninteresting.

The film establishes itself as the hardcore installment with this opening, the cringy hard rock soundtrack, and the opening credits which depict X-rays of the skeletons of previous films’ victims. David R. Ellis, who returns after helming the second film (which has a great opening sequence…not sure why this one is so considerably worse), amps up the gore. Bodies slice in half and twitch on the ground. Adequately splatter schlock, sure, but the effects look heinous.

I appreciate the fast pacing of these films. The first three films are essentially 90 minutes and out. However, this one (which is sub-80 without credits) moves at a ludicrous clip. The first three films take roughly 30 minutes to build up to the accident, show it twice over, and then move the survivors toward understanding the danger they are up against. This one does it in closer to 20. And the set pieces barely have time to develop before all Hell breaks loose. Given these deaths are the entire point of the franchise, it’s sacrilege to fans that the sequences are barely developed.

They also aren’t very creative. As my previous reviews have tried to illustrate, the sequences which work best are those which balance slowly developing tension with a comedic sense of misdirection. These scenes either contain neither of these attributes, or they fail at making one or both of them legible. The salon death ends with a punchline, but there isn’t anything particularly comedic about the scene, not to mention there’s a complete absence of tension.

The Final Destination barely has a sense of identity. It struggles even to fit within the already established structure of the franchise. At one point, the protagonist who is suffering visions of death, Nick (Bobby Campo), out of the blue says that if they stop the next person from dying then it might “break the chain.” He only knows to think this, because the script requires him to fall in line with the same plot of the other films. There’s no other reason why he would have put the pieces together like that. And the tone is meaningless and erratic. Most of the film is played for laughs (unsuccessfully), but then at one moment Mykelti Williamson’s security guard character has a monologue about how his wife and kid were killed in a drunk driving accident that he caused. He’s a severely serious character in a wildly stupid movie.

What’s worse is that the script forgets that Nick says this bit about breaking the chain, because after they save a character in peril, they conveniently forget and have to re-learn that the chain might be broken. This gives the security guard enough time to put his own life in jeopardy, manufacturing stakes through pure lack of continuity. The internal logic of the film is endlessly confused. One character can’t kill himself, because it doesn’t fit with the order. But another character is almost killed by Death despite not being the next person in the order. And a third character does get killed out of order. Not to mention that two characters die in the speedway wreck at effectively the same time, yet Nick somehow knows the order in which the two will die.

This fourth film is the nadir of a franchise that is already fairly mediocre. The script is pure idiocy. The computer effects look horrendous. And the selling point of the franchise, the horror movie kills, are in such desperate need of any creative juice that they are embarrassing.

The Final Destination: D-

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As always, thanks for reading!

—Alex Brannan (Letterboxd, Facebook)