This review is of the TV-14 edited version. All thoughts below should be addressed as such as a review of the unedited version could be more negative

Final Destination is a film that I dare say is a bit iconic. Just about everyone has heard of this film at some point or another. It’s got many sequels and the concept is unique. You basically have to try and watch out because anything can turn into a cause of death and that’s the basic plot of the franchise. Beyond that it’s not going to go down as a great film or anything but it’s an interesting one.

The film starts off with Alex being a little paranoid as he gets on a plane for a school trip. He’s looking around a whole lot because everything looks real suspicious but then this comes to a head when he dies in the plane along with the rest of the school. He wakes up back in the plane a few minutes before the explosion and realizes that this was all a big vision. So he makes a scene and gets thrown off the plane with a few other students while everyone else dies in the explosion. Death isn’t a fun of this though and decides to go take the survivors down for the count. Can they overcome death?

Now the main problem you may guess right off the bat here is that of course there is no real way to beat death. In the end all of the heroes will die at some point so the question is really if they can get death to leave them alone for a while. The short answer to that is….no. Death is a very petty and very determined figure. He intends to stay on their tails until he has taken them all down and will bend all of the rules to make this possible. That means manipulating liquids and objects to place them in positions to choke or murder the characters straight up. Death isn’t interesting in playing fair or doing anything like that. No, it’s just here to cause unimaginable damage.

The heroes discover some rules here like Death has to try and murder them in order. If an attempt fails then it moves onto the next person before eventually repeating the cycle. The cycle never ends though so it’s only a matter of time before it’s your turn again. So the general plan Alex has is to try and delay the murders as long as possible but in the end that’s all he can do, just delay them. Ultimately they will catch up to him and then it’s curtains.

As a main character Alex is fairly decent though. His natural paranoia mixed in with the fact that he now has visions of the future makes for an interesting character. Naturally the other characters don’t tend to believe him until it’s too late but at least Alex keeps on trying. He’s a very determined guy who is really just trying to do his best.

Most of the other characters aren’t quite as reasonable. The one who takes the cake in that regard is Carter though. The film makes him as over the top as possible. Alex literally saved his life and yet this guy has 0 gratitude and wants to fight Alex for no real reason. He listens to crazy music as he drives by and is basically a cartoon villain. By the end he actually gets a character arc which I was noy expecting. I figured he would just die early on as the typical jerk character. Even so, he was a little too far gone so I still didn’t care for him by the end.

The main heroine Clear took a while to really support Alex but at least she still handled it all very logically. She heard Alex out and even when she didn’t agree with him, she wasn’t going out of her way to be mean about it. So Clear gets some credit there at least and ends up lasting a while because she was really vigilant the whole time. The rest of the characters went off to do their own things and it doesn’t go well. Again you can’t really blame the others though and to an extent even if they agreed with Alex, there wasn’t much of a plan at the beginning. They would have still died in some way or another with death watching them.

Again that goes back to the futility of the whole thing. As much a the film seems to want you to think that you can evade Death for a while, I take it more as Death just toying with them. He likes to mainly use liquids to set off the traps but other times he can lock windows and such. It’s clear that he can use any ability as needed and warp reality so at that point it’s still a losing battle. It’s an issue I have with this film like I did with the Grudge. When there is absolutely no hope of winning then it takes away a lot from the movie because you just can’t get as invested. It simply isn’t possible to get involved because the heroes just don’t have a ghost of a chance.

Naturally the film can get fairly violent with some of the deaths. Others aren’t so much violent as they are disturbing like the one friend who gets hanged in the bathroom. The idea is that these are all ways you could theoretically die in real life if you just have bad luck or are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Death is just speeding things up a bit. So the film as a whole ends up being rather depressing as there is no time for any happy moments. Outside of the opening scene getting ready to board the plane…yeah there is no time for positive moments. The heroes are just running from one danger to the next. Each death attempt they dodge only brings them closer to the next one which is just depressing.

Overall, This is one of those movies where you might be tempted to watch it for the novelty but overall I’d say to give it a skip. It’s really just about trying to get as many creative deaths in as possible and that’s not enough to support a whole movie. The film can be rather violent with a bunch of annoying characters running around. There is no hope to escape their destiny so in the end it’s all a futile endeavor. I at least did enjoy the brief appearance from the guy at the morgue. I like the idea of someone at least knowing what’s going on and just going through life knowing that nobody else has this knowledge.

Overall 2/10