Final Destination 3

Everyone drooling over the prospect of another helping of the elaborately constructed death scenes that marked the first two installments of this horror franchise can rest assured: Final Destination 3 delivers the goods, as teens regularly exit stage left courtesy of a mysterious force of fate, or the Grim Reaper if you prefer, in extremely vivid ways—but whether that's enough to make FD3 worth watching is an entirely different matter. Following the adage about sequels—just make the same movie over again—filmmaker James Wong's formula (he helmed the first entry as well) has a group of teens avoiding a fatal accident because one of them has a premonition that disaster is about to strike, after which the kids are knocked off in extravagantly florid ways—runaway truck, nail gun, exercise machine, lance, and even tanning salon. The only differences between this movie and the preceding two are the narrowly averted original disaster (after a plane crash and big auto accident, FD3 offers up a roller-coaster collapse) and the fact that the death scenes here are more gory and explicit. But gnawing familiarity has caught up with this series, and its time that the filmmakers took the adjective in the title seriously and stopped already. Not recommended. [Note: Available in either widescreen or full screen versions, DVD extras on this two-disc “thrill ride edition” include the theatrical version of the film, a “Choose Your Fate” option that lets you change the outcome of the film, audio commentary (by director and co-writer James Wong, co-writer Glen Morgan, and cinematographer Robert McLachlan), the 89-minute “making-of” documentary “Kill Shot,” a 25-minute “Dead Teenager Movie” featurette on the titular subgenre of horror films, a “Planned Accidents” featurette (21 min.), the seven-minute original cartoon short “It's All Around You,” an extended police station scene (3 min.), and trailers. Bottom line: a whopping extras package for a so-so horror flick.] (F. Swietek)