Final Destination DVD > Reviews > DO Fear the Reaper

Author's product rating:   

Did you enjoy it?	Loved it
Story	Good
Characters / Performances	Good
Special Effects	Good
How does it compare to similar films?	Good

Advantages:	Gripping stuff
Disadvantages:	Needs more originality in the character department

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

I’m easy to please, give me a stack of horror/chiller videos and I’ll be entertained for hours. One thing you come to expect from these genres, after seeing the classic pioneers, is that none of them these days are going to be completely original, so I tend to give them some leeway and not expect too much from them. I just want to sit back, forget about everything and switch off my brain. The perfect remedy for this I thought, Final Destination. American teens on a plane trip to France, student has vision of crash, escapes with a few others, plain crashes, survivors get tormented by the threat of death, supernatural forces at work. Excellent. Nothing new, but my kind of entertainment.

Ah, but there’s more too it than that. I mean, its obvious the students are going to get killed one by one at some point, but the lovely makers of this film got wise to the fact that audiences can spot a death trap a mile off. So they played on this, with obvious potential killers, only to find that nothing happens. And then bam, something else gets the blood and gore rolling, usually something you least expected.

Is this starting to sound like ‘Scream’ or ‘Halloween’? Ok, there’s no token evil psychotic killer in a black cape wandering around suburbia with a knife terrorising teenagers. The killer here is death itself. You see the main character Alex (Devon Sawa) has a vision about a horrific plane crash when he falls asleep on the plane with his high school mates on a school trip to Paris. He wakes up from this nightmare, panics and tries to get off the plane causing much chaos. A few of his friends and his teacher Ms Lewton (Kristen Cloke) get off, not too happy with Alex. Then his vision becomes reality and the plane takes off and explodes.

So there’s the basic plot. Somehow Alex had the ability to foresee this disaster and the rest of the film is based around the fate of these seven survivors who managed to cheat death somehow. They messed up deaths plan, so inevitably they must die. Sounds incredibly morbid and typically American, but there are a few attempts at black comedy and it ties in quite well.

The big letdown with this film has to be the portrayal of the students, they‘re just too predictable. You have the standard issue class clown, Billy (Seann William Scott), the annoyingly angry kid who constantly wants to pick a fight, Carter (Kerr Smith of Dawson's Creek fame), the quiet loner Clear (Ali Larter) and the butter wouldn’t melt Tod (Chad E. Donella). Oh and then there’s the FBI suspicious of Alex and his connection with the deaths, just to complete the typical character scenario. The soundtrack isn’t much cop, just the standard indie/rock fare not really adding anything to the atmosphere of the movie. But at the end of the day, this is pure entertainment and it does have the odd twist and turn to keep your eyes glued to the screen.

The death scenes are so dramatic and detailed, they’re fantastically sick. I’m not often phased by blood and gore, but the first surviving student in the film to pop his clogs even made me cringe. Good guy Tod (best friend to Alex) goes for a shave in the bathroom, so the first thing you think of is that he’s going to get sliced by a razor. Then he gets some scissors, so you assume he’s going to be stabbed somehow. I won’t spoil it but it’s not the outcome you may have guessed of.

Alex discovers from a news report that the plane crash was due to a fire that spread throughout the cabin in a specific pattern. That pattern dubiously happens to correspond to the order of where the seven survivors were sitting before they followed Alex off of the plane. A slight weakness in the plot, but it allows the story to develop further by the characters knowing the order in which their deaths are planned. Yes, some die, some survive, but ultimately you never know who’s going to die, how they’ll die, or even how the characters are going to figure out how to escape their fate. The FBI, whilst essential to the plot, just come across as plain annoying and disrupting the flow of the storyline.

There you go, nothing spectacular, but a good chunk of entertainment. Directed by James Wong, this is his first big screen project and it’s a good attempt, drawing in little known actors and ideas from the likes of ‘The Omen’, and previously being involved with the ‘X-Files’. The effects and bloodiness are impressive, especially the dramatic plane explosion which has to be seen to be believed. So don’t expect too much and you’ll be pleasantly surprised, I know I was entertained.

For more info on the film, there’s the official website;

www.deathiscoming.com