Final Destination

Fantasy, Horror, Thriller

Devon Sawa	Alexander Chance Browning
Ali Larter	Clear Rivers
Kerr Smith	Carter Horton
Tony Todd	William Bludworth, the mortician
Kristen Cloke	Ms. Valerie Lewton
Amanda Detmer	Terry Chaney
Brendan Fehr	George Waggner
Daniel Roebuck	Agent J. Weine
Forbes Angus	Mr. Larry Murnau
Lisa Marie Caruk	Christa Marsh
Christine Chatelain	Blake Dreyer
Seann William Scott	Billy Hitchcock
Roger Guenveur Smith	Agent Schreck
Chad Donella	Tod Waggner

Director	James Wong (IV); James Wong
Producer	Glen Morgan; Craig Perry; Warren Zide; Chris Bender; Richard Brener
Writer	Glen Morgan; Jeffrey Reddick; James Wong

While hardly a spiritual upgrade of the slasher film, this high-concept teen body-count thriller drops hints of The Sixth Sense into the smart-aleck sensibility of Scream. Helmed by X-Files veteran James Wong, who cowrote the screenplay with longtime creative partner Glen Morgan, Final Destination is an often entertaining thriller marked by an unsettling sense of unease and scenes of eerie imagery. It suffers, however, from a schizophrenic tone and a frankly ludicrous premise. A high school Cassandra, Alex Browning (Devon Sawa of Idle Hands), wakes from a preflight nightmare and panics when he's convinced the plane is doomed. His ruckus bumps seven passengers from the Paris-bound plane, which immediately explodes into a fireball on takeoff, but fate hasn't finished with these lucky few and, one by one, death claims them. Wong brings such a funereal tone to these early scenes of survivor's guilt and inevitable doom that the already far-fetched film threatens to veer into unplanned absurdity. Thankfully, the tale loosens up with a playful morgue humor: one of the victims winds up the splattered punch line to a grim joke and elaborate Rube Goldbergesque chains of cause and effect become inspired spectacles of destruction. Final Destination is a pretty silly thriller when it takes itself seriously, and the filmmakers play fast and loose with their own rules of fate, but once they stick their tongues firmly in cheek, the film takes off with a screwy interpretation of the domino effect of doom. --Sean Axmaker