Young people, bickering listlessly, watch the car races while sitting in the stands of the racetrack. One of the young men, Bobby Campo, blessed with a vivid imagination, has a detailed video clip playing in his head, showing them all dying in three minutes as a result of a terrible catastrophe. The young man’s imagination does not deceive him: he manages to save his friends, but after a while, they all start dying again in exactly the same sequence as in the prophetic vision, and with the same blood-curdling details – one is sucked into a pool drain, another has a jacuzzi collapse on their head through a soaked ceiling, and so on. The paranoid-predictive episodes accompanying each case serve as a good clue in an attempt to prevent the irreparable, but people, as luck would have it, continue to die anyway.
The fourth “Final Destination” film is on absolutely the same trajectory as the first three installments of the franchise. First, one of the characters sees some ominous mechanisms and objects with their inner eye. Then they rush to help, but arrive too late: the necessary, simple things, from which you don’t expect any trickery in real life – some fan, toaster, or car wash – have already sucked the spinal cord out of a close friend or chopped off their head in an unforeseen way, and so on. In this sense, the literal translation of “Final Destination” is not quite right, it is better to rephrase it as our saying “the pitcher goes often to the well but is broken at last”: run or don’t run from the bricks that are supposed to fall on your head, one will definitely fall.
The Franchise’s Philosophy
It is to such an uncomplicated philosophy that the franchise has come, starting, as I recall, with philosophical reflections on the partial possibility, or complete impossibility, of avoiding what is written in one’s destiny. All that remains of the original idea is an attraction in the genre of grand guignol, illustrating the total conspiracy of things against man. If you really think that coffee spilled on your pants and house keys dropped into an elevator shaft have ruined your life against your will – this is the place for you.
Expect the Unexpected
Prepare yourself, however, for the fact that, having exhausted the conceptual charge of the previous series by the fourth installment, the creators found nothing better than to have some fun in the style of “Troma”: the film abounds in cheerful still lifes made of mock human entrails, tastefully arranged on the pavement, and other ridiculous anatomy, turning the whole action into a humorous version of “Saw”. Or, closer to the truth, into a safety manual filmed by some Eli Roth. Ultimately, the whole moral of the show boils down to this: you need to turn off the water tap when leaving the house, and keep your ass away from all drain holes.
3D Effects
Humor did not betray the authors even in 3D technology.
It adds little that is essential to the dummy of the intestine sucked out through the anus, but the scene where the same onlookers as us watch a three-dimensional film in clown glasses evokes an alarming laugh by the very fact of its existence: the viewers in the hall will still die, but now with the correct – three-dimensional – perception of reality.