MOVIE REVIEW
FINAL DESTINATION
Teens who leave a departing plane before a Flight 800-type crash are killed off, one by one. OK premise quickly deteriorates into a silly, badly acted slasher movie — minus the slasher.Running time: 100 minutes. Rated R. At the 42nd Street E-Walk, the Kips Bay, the Union Square, others.
FEWER things can be more anxiety-provoking than waiting for your plane to take off — something that’s captured with great skill in the opening moments of “Final Destination.”
Alex (Devon Sawa), a senior at a Long Island high school who’s leaving on a class trip to Paris, has no ordinary case of pre-flight jitters. He has an awesomely depicted premonition of a Flight 800-type disaster, and when he freaks out, he and five pals get thrown off the plane.
Sure enough, the plane explodes — and before long, it’s not the only thing going down in flames. An OK premise — can death be cheated? — quickly deteriorates into a silly slasher movie, minus the slasher.
A mysterious force starts killing off the survivors, causing much anxiety for Alex, who quickly figures out who’s next based on, duh, the plane’s seating chart. But can he prevent their deaths, and with what consequences?
James Wong, responsible for several celebrated episodes of “The X-Files” and making his debut as a feature director, seems much less interested in metaphysical questions than in choreographing mayhem and explosions.
The victims’ gory deaths — preceded by much teasing of the audience — involve, among other things, decapitation, high-tension wires and the dangers of dropping vodka into a computer monitor.
Even when Wong gets a good sequence going — one of the teens decides to beat death to the punch by parking his car in the path of an oncoming train — the effect is undercut by the talky and jokey script.
It’s the sort of movie where someone impaled on the kitchen floor with a carving knife is seriously instructed, “Don’t move!”
It doesn’t help that the cast — Ali Larter and Kerr Smith among them — makes the “Scream” crew look like the Royal Shakespeare Company by comparison.
The only actor here who seems to be in on the joke is Tony Todd (“Candyman”), who turns up as an undertaker only long enough to warn that “in death, there are no accidents, no coincidences and no escapes.”
“Final Destination” offers plenty of all three for those who are in the mood.