2009's Spectacularly Silly The Final Destination Delivers the Goods IN ALL THREE DIMENSIONS!

Things get even sillier here!

I take my eldest son to the theater to see movies in 3-D whenever possible. 

I consequently end up seeing a lot of 3-D movies with my boy. We’re both fans of the format, which is great for children and adults on edibles. Most recently, we saw Wicked in 3-D. It was fun, but it didn’t feel like real 3-D. 

These days, when I see a movie in 3-D, it’s generally not a bona fide 3-D movie but a movie you can see in 3-D, though most people choose not to. They’re not crazy about the price/surcharge, but I have that Regal Unlimited, baby! I can see WHATEVER I want for one low monthly price. 

It’s not like the big 3-D boom of the late oughts and early teens. For a few years there, it seemed like everything was 3-D, including the Yogi Bear movie with Justin Timberlake. What a stupid, wonderful era. I miss it so much! 

If I could go back in time, I would kill Hitler, make love to Marilyn Monroe, convince Donald Trump’s father to get a vasectomy before he could befoul the world with offspring, and see 2009’s The Final Destination in the theater in 3-D. 

I know what you’re probably thinking: that I have excellent priorities. I agree. 

The Final Destination formula—OF DOOM—and 3-D are two great, tacky flavors that taste great together. They’re like chocolate and peanut butter in that respect. 

In the Final Destination movies, seemingly harmless but ultimately deadly scraps of metal are forever zooming, flipping, and flying toward characters in a furious hurry to end their lives and separate their heads and limbs from the rest of their bodies. 

Final Destination 2 director Ellis re-upped specifically because he was excited about giving us the freakiest of freak deaths in ALL THREE DIMENSIONS. 

The Final Destination producer Craig Perry insisted that the series employ the then-super-trendy 3-D format to add depth to the proceedings instead of “something pop[ping] out at the audience every four minutes.”

I love 3-D because, when used correctly, something pops out at the audience every four minutes. This over-achieving third sequel ups its game so that something pops out at the audience every two to three minutes. 

Ellis knows exactly what we want: shiny shit flying at the screen of great quality and quantity. That’s exactly what he gives us. 

As the kids say, he understood the assignment.  

The blood-splattered, viscera-heavy fun begins with the requisite big set piece where death is both evaded through telekinetic means and realized on a massive scale. 

This time, death very loudly announces itself at a stock car race attended by bland college student hero Nick O’Bannon (Bobby Campo), his girlfriend Lori (Shantel VanSanten), and lunkhead himbo buddy Hunt Wynorski (Nick Zano). 

Nick has a horrifying vision of a deadly crash that took the lives of spectators and drivers alike in a fiery inferno IN 3-D! I didn’t see it in 3-D, but the nice thing about The Final Destination is that it feels like it’s in three dimensions, even when you’re watching it on a stupid 2-D television, as I was. 

The Final Destination throws down the gauntlet with an opening credit sequence that revisits some of the goriest and most gruesome deaths from the previous three entries in the series in X-ray form. 

That means that we don’t see these doomed dumbasses in their meat costumes but rather as skeletons who meet an unfortunate and graphic end individually and as a group. 

We can all agree that skeletons are more metal than boring old bodies, even when they’re sliced, diced, and reduced to oozing piles of bloody goo, as they often are in Final Destination films. 

It’s the franchise’s way of guffawing heartily in death’s face while asserting that while death may be tragic and harrowing in real life, it’s fucking hilarious and fun in the series’ warped world. 

Nick freaks out, and there is a skirmish that results in the usual broad cross-section of humanity leaving the track just before a massive crash would have taken all of their lives. 

There’s hillbilly tow truck driver Carter Daniels (Justin Welborn), who is helpfully identified as a racist by other characters. That’s his defining feature, more than his job. We know Carter is racist because he has a thick Southern drawl, appears poorly educated, and drops multiple racial slurs. 

That was back in 2009. Today you could give the country-fried hatemonger a MAGA hat to illustrate that he’s an ignorant hick who doesn’t know shit.

They’re joined in the Club of Doom by mechanic Andy Kewzer (Andrew Fiscella) and his girlfriend Nadia Monroy (Stephanie Honoré). 

Nadia isn’t fleshed out enough to warrant being defined by her profession. A tire later beheads her, but that doesn’t distinguish her either. In these movies, more people die from being beheaded unexpectedly by some random bit of debris than from Cancer, heart attacks, and old age combined. 

Mother Samantha Lane (Krista Allen) and security guard George Lanter (Mykelti Williamson) complete the group of temporary survivors. 

Williamson is a big name for a franchise largely devoid of famous faces outside of Tony Todd, who does not appear at all in this entry. He doesn’t even contribute a voice cameo, the way he did with Final Destination 3. 

The Forrest Gump star is a recovering alcoholic and Godly man whose faith was shaken when he lost his family. He’s also the stock character who decides that he’s going to off himself before the Grim Reaper can cross him off his lengthy list. 

Only this time, the doomed dope spends a whole damn day trying to kill himself without luck. That’s because it wasn’t his time to die. 

In hackneyed Final Destination form, the security guard is overjoyed to learn that he’s not doomed and will not be dying a hideous freak death shortly before he dies a freak death. 

The same is true of the mechanic, who similarly announces that he’s not afraid of death and probably will never die, just before he is thrust through a metal fence by an out-of-control carbon dioxide tank. 

That’s a pretty typical death in the Final Destination universe. It practically qualifies as a natural death.

In The Final Destination, as in previous entries, Death proves a hammy villain who peppers the survivors and the audience with spectacularly silly “clues” about how its characters will meet their gruesome ends. 

There’s even a page on Fandom that collects all of the clues for all of the characters. Here, for example, is its exhaustive litany of the clues involving the womanizer pal of the hero, Hunt Wynorski:

*In Nick's vision of the stadium being destroyed, Hunt dies when he's crushed by the cement from falling stadium bleachers.

*Nick has a vague vision of someone dying due to water and a coin, and he can't remember if Hunt or Janet died first. (They both died from the collapse.) All of this relates to both of their deaths: Both Janet and Hunter could have drowned (Janet in the car wash, Hunter in the pool), and they both dropped a coin, in addition to a coin from Janet causing her to go to the car wash (see Janet's death clues below). Janet dropped hers while trying to pay for the car wash, and it fell into some water as Hunter dropped his lucky coin in the pool a few seconds later.

*Hunt’s lucky coin falling into the pool and Hunt going after it leads to his death.

*One interpretation of this is that coincidentally after Hunt loses his coin, his luck goes bad.

*Another interpretation is that Hunt chasing after his lucky coin ironically caused his death, so if he had listened to Janet when she told him to stop it with the lucky coin, he wouldn't have died like that. When at the pool, Hunt's tattoo is visible. It's a Cross.

• After they survived the accident, Hunt said if they were really going to die, he would get laid before dying. Ironically, the last thing he did before dying was having sex. 

• Nick asked Hunt if it would it kill him to be sensitive 

• While Nick was driving to Hunt, he sees a sign that says Clear Rivers. 

• The pressure gauge at full is actually supposed to be on “180."

Clear Rivers references Ali Larter’s character in the first two films, while 180 is a cursed number recurring throughout the series. 

Final Destination’s original title was Flight 180, after the opening setpiece in which Devon Sawa has a premonition about the titular flight, but it was changed so that it wouldn’t seem like a movie about airplanes. 

The Final Destination ends on a meta note with a screening of a packed 3-D movie that predictably goes all kablooie. 

Did Quentin Tarantino steal the image of an exploding movie screen from The Final Destination for Inglorious Basterds? I can’t imagine Tarantino borrowing from another filmmaker, but I will nevertheless say that, yes, he did. 

There was a time when I would have criticized The Final Destination for being stupid, formulaic, predictable, and insanely convoluted. 

I was a fool. Now, I CELEBRATE the Final Destination for possessing those same qualities. These movies are pure junk. That’s why they’re so great!