Final Destination 3 (2006)

Rated R for more gore that is based on being smooshed or stabbed or electorcuted or burned or all kinds of stuff that Mother Nature could do to you.  I don't know why I thought the last one was more upsetting.  Perhaps I'm getting desensitized to the entire franchise, which is probably not the healthiest thing.  But there's also more nudity in this one, which is probably an attempt to comment on morality and death.  Still, a very well deserved R.

DIRECTOR: James Wong

Do you understand that I almost forgot to write this thing?  Here I was, amazed by having a few minutes of time to myself.  Then, given a few minutes before I have to start teaching my class, I remembered that I have this thing on my To-Do list.  It's kind of a bummer.  I have such a busy week that I don't know if I'll be able to get another movie in this week besides Final Destination 3.  

​I have to be watching these movies differently than anyone else who has watched these movies.  Between binging them and knowing that I have to write something unique about them, I am so grateful when there is anything to discuss.  I can tell you right now.  I'm going to be insufferable about two tiny things: technology and villains.  I have an inordinate amount of joy knowing that someone producing Final Destination movies understands that there has to be something new in each movie.  And these things are so objectively insignificant that most people would probably shrug them off.  But I am going to say, Final Destination 3 is the one with the camera.

Now, I am still going to give this movie some nonsense.  I can't deny that this change is important enough to say that Final Desintation 3 did anything risky.  Oh, sweet mercy, this movie is by the book...for the most part.  We still have a protaognist who witnesses everyone's death for arbitrary reasons and saves everyone...only to have them be ripped apart by terrible death traps.  But for a moment, there was a brief second that the movie was going to get to the same conclusion with a different approach.  See, the movie didn't really need Wendy to have a magic vision that acts as the insighting incident.  One of the more frustrating parts of the previous movies is that the protagonist has to explain all the things that they saw in their visions and everyone else instantly becomes an expert.  However, by having a digital camera catch clues to how people are going to die makes the movie about deduction, not simply trust.  

Maybe this is stupid.  The more I write about, the dumber it gets, so there's that.  But I like the notion that we have a concrete image that people can have real conversations about.  After all, there are these characters who know that they are going to die and if they can at least have insight into what these clues possibly mean, that takes a little bit of the pressure of having an all-knowing chosen one.  But I find it weird that we still have this all knowing chosen one.  Wendy doesn't need to have any kind of magic power.  In fact, one of the more frustrating parts about having an all-knowing chosen one is that it doesn't make sense with the narrative.  As much fun as I'm having with Death-having-a-design, why is that protagonist given magical insight into a way to undo Death's design?  We have so little lore about what is actually happening.  Heck, Tony Todd's mortician is gone.  He was the only guy who gave us clues last time.  I mean, he's still in the movie as the voice of the devil on the devil ride.  But Final Destination 3 gives us an out of this silly plot device.  

If you have a camera capturing the way that people were going to die, it's not about a mysterious force helping people out.  Instead, it gives us all the ability to see how we're going to die.  If anything, that gives the world of Final Destination a concrete rule.  Instead of Wendy being the chosen one, she's instead rewarded for her observation and trust in a more complicated world.  I don't know why I'm so wired for horror films to have a moral component to them.  Wendy is clearly the good guy of this story, despite the fact that she's a little mean to Kevin.  But we root for her because she is so observant.  She is willing to look at the mundane through a fresh perspective.  Honestly, it doesn't just imbue her with something almost unearned.  The first two films gave the characters a power that has almost nothing to do with their personality.  If anything, the only thing that was rewarded in the first two films was their irrational phobias.  It's odd, because that shouldn't necessarily be a trait that is encouraged.  Yet, the Final Destination movies are constantly about reaffirming that you shouldn't try anything out of your comfort zone.

The second element that makes Final Destination 3 not just another entry is that the movie gave us a villain.  The nature of these films is that there is no Big Bad to rally against.  It's punching the ocean.  There's nothing there to beat head-on.  Instead, these movies tend to be about loopholes.  These stories are almost arguing with the wording of a contract.  But adding McKinley as a villain brings about an interesting idea.  It's a wasted idea, but it's an idea nonetheless.  The previous movies teased the notion that if someone died out of order, it may throw Death's design into a tizzy.  Again, this is an attempt to get out of a contract.  But McKinley, instead of making it about suicide, decides to go homicidal.  If McKinley can kill someone on the list who isn't scheduled to die, that would potentially end the run.  Now, I cannot stress enough how wasted of a concept that this is.

I don't think that the screenwriter, nor the director, knew what to do with McKinley.  McKinley is aggressively an archetype.  The only mood that McKinley consistently portrayed was "aloof."  Now, I know some of you are rolling your eyes considering that I'm really going in deep with the third entry of a franchise that most people don't care about to begin with.  Tough.  I want to talk about how McKinley can't just be aloof.  McKinley is a side character until the funeral for the tanning bed girls.  (Yeah, I wrote that sentence which you should be able to use to justify why all this writing is just wasted digital real estate.)  McKinley makes a point to stress that the pastor's words are empty and that Death should make a point out of giving people long and full lives.  He's dismissive of the structure of funerals, so he walks off.  Okay, it seems like he's anti-establishment.  But the next time we see McKinley in any real context, he's at his job at the hardware store with his girlfriend.  It's weird that McKinley, who seems to pride himself on being counter-cultural, works for a big box store and that he murders pigeons with a nail gun, considering that he just advocated for the value of life.  When Wendy and Kevin present a case that should be up McKinley's alley --a guy who just treated Death as a conscious entity at a funeral --McKinley is not only dismissive of them; he's mocking them.  He thinks its all silly and he starts playing it fast and loose with safety.

When Erin dies because of Wendy's intervention, he's now wrathful not at death, but at Wendy. He comes up with that idea to kill Wendy, which is now a different personality than the previous two scenes.  He even stresses that he's been skipped anyway, so it shouldn't matter.  (Note:  I find it weird that McKinley was supposed to die before Erin and he believes he's been skipped over.  It's actually Wendy's intervention that leads to Erin dying, meaning that interventions seem to be part of Death's design?  I don't know how free will works in this universe!) But the notion that they can fight something is fun.  The problem is that they don't fight McKinley.  McKinley simply stated that he was safe because he didn't know the order in which he died.  Then he's taken out fairly unceremoniously and that villain element disappeared.  But how much better would that have been?  I wanted to see this McKinley stalker playing out among the random death that is closing in among them.  The concept is so good and I don't think we'll ever get that kind of character in the future.  Maybe I'm wrong.  I feel like this a franchise that probably can't repeat that beat twice.

Anyway, this is a fun movie.  I don't necessarily love that Wendy got a vision of her own death after it was too late to prevent it.  Still, these movies tend to be fun.  And apparently, all I need is small changes to the formula to write about these movies beyond this point.   Yay.