My Journey Through the Final Destination Continues with the Spectacularly Silly Final Destination 3

It's just what I needed!

I am obscenely grateful to the geniuses behind the Final Destination series for providing me with the escapism I desperately need during this fraught and terrifying time. 

If you were to ask me what I was doing on November 11th, 2024, twenty years from now, I would probably answer, “Reeling from Donald Trump's re-election and fearing for our nation’s future.” 

That’s because it’s November 11th, 2024, and I am reeling from the landslide re-election of Donald Trump and fearing for our nation’s future. I’m also, thank God, watching and writing about the cinematic masterwork that is 2006’s Final Destination but that does not seem as important as the death of American democracy and the American dream. Somehow, I always knew that it would come at the hands of a cast member of Ghosts Can’t Do It and The Little Rascals. 

What I love about horror movies is EVERYTHING! I am a “fan” of the genre. A “fright fiend,” as it were. A real “horror hound.” I’m positively mad for the macabre!

The only thing I don’t like about horror is the violence. And the scares. And when they use foul language or disrespect the Lord. And sequels. And slashers. And haunted house movies. And monster movies. And movies about zombies, vampires, and Creatures from the Black Lagoon. 

Otherwise, I’m all in! I mean, yes, I think that horror movies corrupt the innocence of children, lead to copycat violence, and should all be banned, but that doesn’t mean I’m not a fan.

I love horror movies because the darkness is corny, containable, and infinitely knowable. In the Final Destination movies, death has a design—it’s fussy and particular. 

The real world follows no design. It is not rational. There is no logic to it. Thinking it will make sense and be fair is a path to madness. 

Thankfully, we can escape into a world where death is fun, campy, and silly—a fine way to kick off your morning. Nothing means anything anymore in this world, and we’re all careening madly into oblivion. 

But we have Final Destination 3 and Final Destination 2! They will not save us, but they do provide some consolation. 

Final Destination brings back the high-powered X-Files team of co-writer/director James Wong and co-screenwriter Glen Morgan. Wong proved to be the right man for the job. He brings a sense of Hitchockian craft while maintaining the goofy camp fun of the second entry in the series. 

Like Final Destination 2, Final Destination 3 leans into the ridiculousness of its central conceit of death as a petty bitch that goes bucking for revenge when a teenager blessed with telekinetic powers cockblocks it by having a premonition of mass death and destruction that comes true after they narrowly avoid a freak death along with friends, colleagues or strangers. 

Final Destination 3 adds to the convoluted campiness by having its plucky heroine behave like a supernatural shamus, looking for clues about imminent freak deaths in the photographs she takes. 

She’s like a one-woman Mystery Gang, but every time she rips off a mask, the culprit turns out to be the Grim Reaper, the morbid bastard behind, literally, every death. Ever.

This includes the great Tony Todd, who stunned fright fans by dying at 69 a few days ago. I love the guy, and once had the honor of interviewing him in person, so I am majorly bummed, but rumor has it that just before his demise, he was the sole survivor of a plane crash, a lethal 18-car pile-up, AND a rollercoaster disaster that resulted in dozens of deaths. All in the same week! So it might just be another case of life imitating art. Great, great art.

Tony Todd frustratingly does not return as Mr. Bludworth in Final Destination 3, but he contributes a pair of memorable voice cameos as the ominous voice of a deadly Satan-themed roller coaster that wracks up quite the body count and a sinister subway train conductor. 

The movie suffers from Todd’s absence as an onscreen presence but lucked out in snagging a young Mary Elizabeth Winstead as the lead. 

The future Scott Pilgrim Versus the World icon, who I just learned is married to Ewan McGregor (Trainspotting himself!), is better and classier than the movie probably deserves. She grounds the spectacular silliness in a very real sense of dread and foreboding. The acting in this series is generally just good enough, but Winstead delivers a genuinely fine performance in a spectacularly silly motion picture.

Final Destination 3 opens with an elaborate set piece in which Winstead’s Wendy Christensen has a premonition that a roller coaster ride will go dangerously awry, killing the unfortunate souls onboard. 

Our heroine freaks out and gets a broad cross-section of types to join her in leaving the rollercoaster just before a deadly crash. They include Kevin Fisher (Ryan Merriman), the boyfriend of a best friend that perished in the crash, ditsy sorority girl types Ashley Freund (Chelan Simmons) and Ashlyn Halperin (Crystal Lowe), dedicated perv/wannabe Wooderson Frankie Cheeks (Sam Easton), jock Lewis Romero (the wonderfully named Texas Battle) and goths Ian McKinley (Kris Lemche) and Erin Ulmer (Alexz Johnson). 

They’re lucky—in the short term. They’re survivors, but not for long. With the possible exception of Wendy, who gives clear Final Girl energy despite the film’s dark/ambivalent conclusion, they’re all clearly fucked. 

Death is about to do to these cursed souls what it does to everyone who escapes its icy grasp: catch them on the rebound, either when they least or most expect it.

The comic relief Valley Girls meet an unfortunate end in a tanning bed fire. The cocky jock very loudly proclaims that he does not believe in the idea that he is being stalked by Death for fucking up its plan immediately before he is punished for his hubris with the world’s most predictable violent death. 

Death is everywhere in Final Destination 3. It likes to have options, so it generally stalks its victims in two or three directions before ultimately going in for the kill. 

Final Destination 3 does not have the time or energy to develop its characters beyond broad caricatures because getting to know them would take time away from the campy essence of the franchise: chain reactions where something seemingly minor or inconsequential leads irrevocably to a hideous freak death.

There are no deaths from old age here. It’s a kooky world where deaths from defenestrations are more common than deaths from heart attack or cancer, and people have a roughly ten percent chance of being impaled at any given moment. 

What Wendy and her survivors do with photographs taken before the crash is known in QAnon circles as “baking.” The idea is that Q will release a cryptic “drop” alerting followers to something that might theoretically happen in a world where everything is possible but will not happen in this one, like Tom Hanks and Oprah Winfrey being tried and executed for crimes against humanity. 

Only instead of dissecting Q's provocative revelations, Wendy pores over photographs of her fellow (temporary) survivors so that she can make wild guesses about what various shadows could mean that generally turn out to be accurate. 

The Final Destination movies are casually but persistently sadistic in their willingness, even eagerness, to kill off ALL of their characters, not just the dumb ones. 

Even when it seems like a hero or heroine has definitively cheated death and can look forward to a long, satisfying life full of family and friends and faith, they still fucking die in freak accidents, or at least appear to die. 

That happens to poor Wendy, who ends up on an out-of-control subway car just when she thinks she’s done the impossible and scored a decisive victory over the Grim Reaper. 

Like the Fast and the Furious movies, these are big, dumb, vulgar American machines. God bless their transcendent, cathartic stupidity. 

Up next: The Final Destination, which, tragically, I will not be able to see in 3-D, as the Lord intended.