My Review of Final Destination (2000)

Written by Glen Morgan And James Wong And Jeffrey Reddick

Directed by James Wong

Bludworth: "In death there are no accidents, no coincidences, no mishaps, and no escapes."

Over the next few weeks and leading into Halloween, I'll be tackling a few horror franchises. This one isn't a favourite of mine but I thought it was time to have a look back at these films.

Focusing on High school student Alex Browning (Devon Sawa), who's got the gift of seeing deaths happening. It's a power that saved the likes of Carter Horton (Kerr Smith), Tod Waggner (Chad E. Donella), Terry Chaney (Amanda Detmer), Valerie Lewton (Kristen Cloke), Billy Hitchcock (Seann William Scott) and Clear Rivers (Ali Larter).

At the airport, Alex managed to prevent all of their deaths, even though it had him fighting with Carter and put him in the firing line of Agent Weine (Daniel Roebuck) and Agent Schreck (Roger Guenveur Smith). They weren't exactly quick to believe that Alex could see future deaths but the likes of William Bludworth (Tony Todd) was more open minded.

Of course it turned out that Bludworth knew about the rules of death and the consequences of what happened when death is cheated on. Let's just say that it's not good and in the end, death ultimately will win out. As expected.

The rest of this film was Alex and Clear and eventually Carter working together to not only survive but to keep their peers and teacher alive. Of course, they'd fail on the latter front but as a team, the three did manage to mostly keep each other alive. It even looked like they broke the cycle until they didn't.

The movie needed a final twist and one of the three had to die. Character wise, it did make sense for it to be Carter. He was the weakest of the bunch and the movie seemed more invested in developing both Alex and Clear as a couple. Carter was ultimately expendable in service of them.

- All of the characters are named after famous horror directors, producers and actors.

- The idea behind this movie almost ended up being an episode of The X-Files. 

- Standout music: John Denver's Rocky Mountain High.

- Chronology: There's a six months time jump where the trio ended up in Paris. It was where Carter would die.

Final Destination (2000) isn't a favourite horror film series of mine but I did like this first film. There's some good scares and kills, rules set up for the manner of death and Devon Sawa was a sympathetic lead as Alex Browning.

Rating: 7 out of 10