Final Destination (2000)

Directed by James Wong. Starring Devon Sawa, Ali Larter, Kerr Smith, Seann William Scott, Kristen Cloke, Chad E. Donella, Amanda Detmer, Daniel Roebuck, Roger Gunveur Smith, Tony Todd, Brendan Fehr. [R]

A couple of “X-Files” veterans (James Wong, Glen Morgan) tackle a story idea initially devised for the TV series: you can’t cheat Death, and if you try, just wait. A high school student (Sawa) has a premonition that the airplane that he and his classmates are about to take for a class trip to Paris is going to blow up shortly after takeoff, and his panicked reaction results in his ejection from the flight along with several other students and a teacher; sure enough, the plane does go down, but the survivors were never meant to live, so a series of elaborate fatal “accidents” start befalling them one after the other. A slasher movie where the slasher is never seen (unless you subscribe to the theory that Todd’s walk-on is supposed to represent a corporeal representation of the ol’ Grim Reaper, and “you don’t want to f— with that Mack Daddy”), burdened by unanswered questions, undercooked gimmicks, and shallow swipes at existentialism. Made marginally palatable by a handful of creative set pieces and in-jokes, like playing plane-crash-victim John Denver music on multiple occasions, or having nearly every character be named after a famous horror filmmaker/actor (Browning, Murnau, Schreck…heck, the teacher is named Val(erie) Lewton!), but the plotting and dialogue are excessively stupid, and the tone never swings safely into outright camp like it would as the series progressed—it’s spawned four sequels to date.

43/100