The following movie review comes from Amber Hathaway:
While I'd like to tell you that Final Destination 3 was far better or far worse than one would expect; it's everything that a crappy third movie in a crappy series should be. The plot is weaker and the characters are less likeable, but there are more boobs and bloodier deaths to keep you distracted. It follows the same formula as the previous two movies and the quick succession of deaths make the thing seem to last under an hour, even if the real runtime is about 90 minutes.
Spoiler Alert: yadda yadda, it's not like there's much to spoil. But I'll do it, dammit.
The movie starts out with a bunch of high school seniors at an amusement park having a jolly good time. The protagonist is a quiet girl with a hair-layering problem and a surgically-attached camera to be used to fill the upcoming high school yearbook. She and her boyfriend, best lady friend, and best lady friend's boyfriend are all chit-chatting away and they're looking forward to going on a terrifying rollercoaster. Taking pictures as they go, the girl (Wendy) and her pals spend about 3 years getting to the ride, at which time there's a vicious accident on the coaster and everyone dies. A leak in the hydraulics line is worsened by a complete tool's video camera that he snuck onto the ride. Upon dropping the camera onto the tracks, the coaster train runs over it and bing bang boom. The crash sequence is actually pretty neat and not entirely predictable, so the movie has that working for it.
Of course, as was the case in movies 1 and 2, this is just a vision, and Wendy snaps out of it just in time to freak out and get off the ride. Unfortunately, her beau and her best lady friend are not allowed to exit before the ride takes off, and are killed accordingly. The people involved in the scene of Wendy's panic, however, are "saved" by her vision and are due to die in 3, 2, 1...
We start with the two hair-twirling, gum-chewing, "like"-spouting wastes of space. They are the archetypal blonde idiots (one of them being brunette changes nothing), and prove their worth in the movie by only being in it for about 10 minutes before getting totally naked. They head to the tanning salon because it is totally, like, their responsibility to look their best at graduation to honor the dead students. That is actually their reasoning, not mine. I wish I were making that up. So at the salon, a silly and unlikely series of events occurs so that the girls end up in tanning beds (naked) with the lone shop keeper locked outside and occupied. A malfunction makes the tanning beds crank up the temperature, but when the girls go to open the beds and turn it down, a shelf falls and traps them inside. They begin to burn, then cook, then go ablaze in delicious morality-play glory.
The rest of the movie continues in this fashion, with each death getting more violent and gory. There's a propeller to the back of one guy's head, a nail gun incident, a spiking, and a squashing. Some of them are quick and unexpected, which makes the scenes surprising and the movie fly by like the director had someplace to be. Which I suppose is alright, because if the movie were more than an hour and a half, the plot holes would have flapped in the wind even noisier. The most apparent of those, to me, was the fact that the accident on the rollercoaster was set off by the camera getting wrapped around the tracks. One problem: when Wendy had her premonition, the guy and his camera got off the coaster. So why did it still crash? There's also the problem of Wendy's meeting with fate. Each person's death is supposedly foretold by his/her respective picture from Wendy's camera. The propeller guy was standing in front of a fan, and so forth. Wendy's picture is just her wearing a McKinley High School t-shirt, which makes her think that a goth-esque young man named Ian McKinley is going to cause her death. Except he just sort of yells a lot and gets squashed by a crane. The "intervening" force there was pretty weak.
The only thing that differed in this movie from the Final Destination formula was the ending. Instead of just showing that the cycle will begin again or whatever, Wendy has a second premonition some five years later. We get a whole new accident scenario, this time involving the subway she's riding. Unfortunately, the vision comes to her too late, and it's assumed (though not shown) that she and the other previous survivors are done for. Which is good, because we don't need any future sequels to this tapped-out line. All in all, it was worth what I paid for it, which was nothing because it was a free screening. It's a good bad movie, in that it provides plenty of laughs and cringes, but don't expect much else from this piece of work. Rating: 4/10
