Death be not proud.
Death, in fact, be shameless. This shapeless entity never fails — kind of a glory hound, all “Look at me, negotiation is futile!” Every August, about this time, as the days grow shorter and the awful meaning of Labor Day sets in, Death, whom one would think would take a holiday, camps out in the multiplex and chews up perfectly good screens that could be showing a Juliette Binoche picture. Instead, the most disposable horror flicks, the ones that cast limb removals the way other genres cast actors, the ones that haven’t already been slated for January or April, turn up, only weirder and nastier than what’s found in those other seasonal landfills. Friday, for example, we get both Rob Zombie’s “Halloween II” and “The Final Destination,” the latest installment of the most anal-retentive horror franchise in history. Now that I think of it, maybe Death needs a long holiday.
Indeed, in this summer of all summers — a busy season for Death, whose toll included even Gidget the Taco Bell Chihuahua — “The Final Destination” is, perhaps, his vacation.
It’s certainly mine.
After a summer of incomprehensible Transformer warriors and quasi-terrorist hamsters and Katherine Heigl, I look forward to this 9-year-old series the way a 10-year-old looks forward to “G.I. Joe: The Rise of More Cobras.” In fact, it hardly matters that “Final Destination” was not screened for critics. Neither was “Halloween II,” but I don’t need a review to know which picture has its entrails in the right place. Whereas Zombie’s rebooting of the “Halloween” films feels even more laden with muddy psychological pretense and near-geological layers of back story than the original series gathered across 20 years, the “Final Destination” films are streamlined, blissfully unencumbered by plot, character, ambition — everything but the inevitability of fate.
Which sounds much grimmer than it comes off.
The “Final Destination” series is less Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal” (dour and stone-faced) than Looney Toons’ “A Light Meditation on Reckoning,” played with a straight face. Think “Scream,” knowing and satirical, without the pregnant wink of irony. Or, perhaps, it’s the closest we’ve come to a live-action “Tom and Jerry” franchise. Or, wait, maybe, as I’ve insisted for years, the “Final Destination” films are really the most pessimistic episodes of “Mr. Magoo” that Jim Backus never got around to.
The premise, high concept and laughably insane when the original debuted in 2000, beyond parody three films later, is something of a cross between an industrial safety film and a traditional slasher picture. But where a hallmark of the slasher series is the mythology surrounding the slasher — how he was wronged, why he was wronged, how he’s lived in the woods and eaten dogs while biding time, why his head exploded in the last film but he’s returned even stronger in this installment — the genius of the “Final Destination” franchise is that it does away with the antagonist entirely. Rather, it does away with a tangible antagonist.
There is no creepy 2nd grader with a pale pallor or computer-generated gothic fright — not even a bald albino in a long dark shroud.
The bad guy is Death.
As in, the thing itself. As in, Death can’t be cheated, no matter how frantically the protagonists stave him off. (And, by the way, let’s assume Death is a male in this series — the characters, as steeped in slasher film convention as we are, think so.) No, this bad guy is invisible, and can be slowed but not defeated. And so, with each installment, the series resets itself and Death casts his eye on a fresh group of victims. In less subtle hands, such a premise might become an invitation for torture porn of pure joylessness. Death, however, as this series suggests, is not just a malignant force, but a force of nature with a quirky personality — specifically that of a control freak, of an unstoppable Rube Goldberg who, one imagines, retains a lengthy to-do list and hates it when a teenager who looks 26 messes it up. Yes, he kills subjects in clever ways, as any self-respecting gore fiesta demands, but removing a physical murderer from the picture (quite literally) takes away a great deal of the vileness.
You might even say there’s poetry in the “Final Destination” series, a sweaty recognition of mortality that the average slasher flick trivializes. Oh, don’t get me wrong, these pictures are trivial. And sadistic, definitely. Just not mean-spirited, rarely cruel.
There is a difference. While the “Hostel” pictures and the “Saw” series behave as if the methodical implementation of pain gains some profundity by allowing the audience to linger at queasy length over the suffering — while even the most savage of contemporary horror movies come with at least the pricey sheen of professional studio filmmaking and somehow equate knowing one’s way around a lighting rig and a Sam Peckinpah festival with having something meaningful to say about violence — the “Final Destination” series remove that pomposity by making the moments of death fast and the moments right before comical. Indeed, with few changes, the average death in a “Final Destination” movie could play like an elaborate comedy sketch, and the light, willfully plastic tone almost recognizes as much. (See sidebar)
However the end comes, Death did it. Because Death, we’re told, had this plan — in the first film, he blew up an airliner, in the second he caused a spectacular highway accident involving logging equipment, in the third he fiddled with a roller coaster and, in the new movie, apparently, he sends cars careening off the track during a stock-car race. In each film, someone meant to die has a premonition of Death, alerts a bunch of friends, hustles away to safety, then spends the movie being accounted for. How obsessive-compulsive is Death? So fastidious he kills the characters who escaped in the order in which they were to meant to die.
A number of sequences are suspenseful — absurdly so, considering suspense implies a way out. If anything, this franchise is an upending of Alfred Hitchcock’s bomb-beneath-the-table lesson — it shows the audience a bomb beneath a table, but doesn’t tell the characters, and doesn’t tell the audience when it will go off. Surprise, Hitchcock said, was just setting the bomb off without any warning. But what do you call the “Final Destination” method? Every time, several times per film, a bomb will go off and the characters will escape — the suspense is in whether they will see the banana peel while they’re running to safety.
The “Final Destination” movies are like a pessimist’s “Lord of the Rings” — a long trudge toward certain doom without the hope of success, which is oddly comforting. Nothing, these films say, will work out, not in the long run, not ever, so why try? Death will always put in more office hours. You can’t compete. For the young victims of this franchise, before the initial disaster sets off events, death is a rumor, a far-off abstraction that happens to other people. But they soon learn, as Emily Dickinson once wrote, “Because I could not stop for Death/ He kindly stopped for me.” And, really, it’s no problem. He’s got this list.
– – –
Ticket to final destination might be a bowling ball
Death here is death implemented by the everyday, by common objects placed in such a way that a chain reaction of mishaps steam-rolls into the ultimate reckoning. For example, in the first three films, people have been killed by bowling balls, radiator fans, nail guns, tanning beds, microwave ovens, gym equipment, buses, subway trains, fire-escape ladders. We usually get a quick close-up of the catalyst — a cup of water that will topple, the water landing on a ledge that will drip onto the frayed wire behind the microwave oven, which will explode, which will set fire to the kitchen, which will send the character onto the fire escape, which will collapse because of the explosion in the kitchen, which will send the character tumbling to the ground, somehow uninjured, until, just as he sighs, the fire escape ladder unrolls directly into his head.
Something like that.
— Chris Borrelli
———-