Final Destination 3

release year: 2006
genre: suspense
viewing setting: home DVD, 8/19/06

synopsis: After a girl has a premonition and inadvertently saves a few people from a rollercoaster crash, the survivors start dying one by one.

impressions: Same deal, new movie. While it is marginally entertaining to see the new and contrived ways in which Death will claim these people, the concept is getting old. So far, all three movies have tried to lay down "rules" and make sense of "Death's design" but in all three cases, the logic has turned out to be either incomplete or faulty, and everyone ended up dying anyway. As a viewer of these movies, I need a way to root for someone to survive; after the end of the first movie, my attitude for the sequels has been that everyone's going to die so there's no point in thinking otherwise. This takes any guesswork and anticipation out of the movies.

something this movie has that no other movie has: Two naked chicks getting trapped in tanning beds and burning to death while the disco song "Rollercoaster of Love" is playing. That's messed up.

acting: The survivors were the typical group of kids: some figured out what was going on, some denied it, and some were blissfully ignorant even as they died in some gruesome and sudden way.

final word: Entertaining, but unless writers can take this series in a new direction, they need to stop now.

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