Final Destination 3
Directed by James Wong
London
Directed by Hunter Richards
An adult male sprang up from his seat during the all-media screening of Final Destination 3 and applauded one of the movie’s many elaborate, violent setpieces, one in which a character dies while weightlifting. Later, a teenage viewer laughed loudly, clutching his stomach with his left hand and pointing at the screen with his right when a character is smashed by a falling road sign. Throughout Final Destination 3, audiences are wide-eyed and delirious; they come to this fear-of-death franchise for its satirical refinement of grand guignol.
These were the last audience reactions I expected. Steven Spielberg’s Munich displeased critics because it is out of sync with the vogue for violence. The contemporary movie-going majority, bred on the pleasures of sadism, got bummed out when Spielberg forced viewers to feel the moral cost of violence. Munich further proves the director’s advance from that unfortunate miscalculation in Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indy pulled out a gun to dispatch an Arab with slapstick cunning.
Audiences (and critics who can’t accept Spielberg’s thoughtful vision) are accustomed to simply enjoying violence. Most movies—including the recent “serious” film A History of Violence—feed that bloodlust without any qualms. Callousness has been repeatedly, officially sanctioned. Consider that the funniest line in The New Yorker’s praise of Match Point was its snooty suggestion that Woody Allen’s killings allowed readers to appreciate their own bourgeois sensitivity! Outright remorse and grief are unhip; coolness—even about death—is now considered a sign of sophistication.
And here’s where Final Destination 3 takes one by surprise. It rejects cool for comic horror. That may sound like the flip of Munich, but it’s still essentially humane because it recognizes dismay as an honest response to death. Sensitivity comes through in the reflective moments when teens Kevin and Wendy (Ryan Merriman and Mary Elizabeth Winstead) plot to cheat death. These innocent-looking highschool seniors have witnessed the decimation of their classmates at an amusement park and then await—and attempt to outwit—their own fates. One clever scene announces the presence of the Grim Reaper with the image of a Ramones bobblehead doll. This connects with a student’s brave boast that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, man,” which is made prior to boarding a rollercoaster (the film’s first scary set-piece). Pop-Nietzche and pop-nihilism have been swallowed whole without real comprehension by the characters. In permitting audiences to see the irony of its protagonists’ youthful flippancy being expressed moments before they die, Final Destination 3 offers a message.
What is comical is the high schoolers’ absurd, futile efforts to control what cannot be avoided. One student asks, “Is death, like, a person?” and the jejune question gets a jejune answer: “No, it’s a force.” Instead of exploring metaphysics, Final Destination 3 depicts death in kinetic terms. You don’t have to be a professor or a theologian to get a grip on what’s shown.
Director James Wong displays genuine cinematic inventiveness. Having obviously studied DePalma, Wong makes good use of screen space and split compositions, and times the chain-reaction, fatal-accident relays with snap and gallows humor. The Final Destination series is all about spectacle—the only thing we know this side of death—which means its violence is stylized, where so many other youth-targeted movies (from the Texas Chain Saw Massacre and House of Wax remakes to Saw, Hostel and Wolf Creek) present it with tactless brutality. Final Destination 3’s unexpected visual wit—it is a live-action Road Runner cartoon—distinguishes it from those grind-house flicks, making it fascinating and defensible as pop entertainment.
Here’s a bonus: Wong’s carnival says more about the specter of death haunting contemporary youth than such ostensibly sensitive movies about adolescent carnage as Gus Van Sant’s Elephant. By teasingly treating the inevitability of mortality as a preoccupation among young people, this film directly addresses what Van Sant’s art-movie kept coolly distant. Refusing to make a statement on the Columbine massacre, Van Sant allowed his voyeur audience to feel judgmental and superior. Call Final Destination 3 an absurdist form of grief counseling. Those moviegoers who exclaimed their personal mix of shock and delight were coping with their consciousness of what death is. And Wong helps out with delightfully ironic, pop leitmotifs, like using the song “Love Train” during the movie’s rollercoaster scene, or “Turn Around, Look at Me” for a stalker episode.
Despite its domino-effect game quality, the film startles us into awareness about modern culture. It’ll be hard to top the comment on sexist consumerism and teenage narcissism made in the sequence where a tanning salon bed becomes a sarcophagus. Its climactic image—a phosphorescent close-up of a nude hottie in eyeshades, her mouth open to scream and her tongue pierced with a sex stud—is like a Polaroid snapshot capturing contemporary degeneracy. It’s eerily fatal and fantastic—a death-fixated version of a Warhol silkscreen.
The most surprising realization about Final Destination 3 is that its satire preserves human values, blunt as its methods are. In the grisliest death scene, a goth-girl is sprayed by a staple gun, yet she gesticulates (a last gasp) even though plastic clips have punctured her face. This graphic explicitness provokes groans of distaste and nervous giggles among viewers. But the Munich scene it resembles (where a young man is shot through his cheek, yet he continues to breath, walk and think) moves one past nervousness, beyond giggling, to sober astonishment. And grief.
It was alarming that so few critics knew how to value that effect. Has film culture become so blood-thirsty that no offense to the human body or spirit can be taken seriously? Spielberg’s contemplation of violence is bound up with his respect for life. He uses film craft earnestly. Munich wants audiences to be appalled at violence, while most films urge audiences to be thrilled. But we’ve gotten so complacent about cheap thrills that perhaps a movie like Final Destination 3 offers some hope. Its subway-set coda is almost courageously bleak. It puts viewers back in touch with what should be respected. Their laughter is not delectation, but genuine fear. A step, perhaps, in the right direction.
London is also in the right direction. Writer-director Hunter Richards does what Mike Nichols’ atrocious Closer never did—examine romantic pain as a manifestation of spiritual desolation and sexual exhaustion. Think of a mini Hurlyburly starring Chris Evans and Jason Stratham, both captivating as boys gone bad, attempting to anesthetize their insecurity about women. Richards’ London is not a place but an unreachable girl (Jessica Biel), and the men’s all-night garrulous coke party has a final (classical theater) destination: No sleep ‘til catharsis. A minor film, but worthwhile for the depth of its stars’ exhibition: two men unafraid to crack their immensely watchable surfaces.
