The Final Destination' leaves viewers hoping that this is the last stop

    There is no fun to be had in "The Final Destination." Where the first three movies in the series had a sense of humor, the fourth features only despair, dread and violence, which says a lot about a franchise whose central hook is reveling in watching characters kick the bucket.
    Many critics attacked director Eli Roth for his "Hostel" movies, calling them torture porn, but with "The Final Destination," director David R. Ellis perfects this frowned-upon genre. In pornography the plot is only there to set up the sex scene; in "The Final Destination," poorly acted, stilted dialogue scenes are sandwiched between the money shots, with the blood from the deaths of nameless characters as the bodily fluid of choice.
    Although no one really cares about the people on screen during "The Final Destination," it's still horrible to watch them die, though not for the usual moral and civil reasons. Watching them die is terrible simply because it means that the movie isn't over yet.
    The grisly "Final Destination" franchise began in 2000 with "Final Destination." The first was a serviceable horror movie complete with thrills, scares, tension and, most notably, a plot. The second, with the clever title "Final Destination 2" (2003), boasted gory kills and special effects, but tried too hard to be a good film and failed miserably. By the series' next outing, "Final Destination 3" (2006), the filmmakers had quite obviously resigned themselves to making a laughable, campy movie.
    Each movie follows the same formula: someone has a premonition of a terrible accident, saves a small group of people by making a fuss about said event, and watches as everyone who survived dies off slowly. As we are told in each film, over and over, death cannot be cheated.
    Death as portrayed in "The Final Destination" would make Rube Goldberg himself proud. In the first few films, the absurdity of the deaths — for example, a man getting cut in half with a barbed wire fence — made it feel acceptable to watch the gore, sick as that may sound. In this edition, however, the bells and whistles accompanying each death only make it more excruciating to watch.
    Had this fourth movie kept the tone of the third Final Destination movie, easily the most cartoonish of all, it could have been enjoyable. Instead, it made the same mistake as the second film in the series: trying too hard (but only for about half of the film) and falling flat as a result.
    "The Final Destination" is one hour and 22 minutes. In 3-D it will cost anywhere between $13 and $20 to see. At $13, this movie costs 16 cents a minute. At $20 each minute costs about a quarter. Most movies, even in the most expensive markets, cost less than 10 cents a minute. It may seem silly, obnoxious even, to break down the movie by cost per minute, but "The Final Destination" drags. It drags so hard that after about a half an hour viewers will begin to ask the people next to them what time it is and when the abomination in front of them will be over.
    After its first half-hour, "The Final Destination" gives up completely. It seems clear that the screenwriter quit, was fired, or died, and the movie becomes a nothing but a series of gruesome death scenes. Even worse, in the final seconds of the movie audiences are treated to the biggest cop-out ever to appear on celluloid.
    It is completely unsurprising that the creative team behind this film is composed of the same people who brought unsuspecting audiences "Final Destination 2": writer Eric Bress and director David R. Ellis. Bress' involvement is to be expected, but Ellis is better than this. While many laughed at his opus "Snakes on a Plane" (2006), it was actually a great action movie that had an unfortunately blunt title. Maybe that was a fluke, though, as the direction in "The Final Destination" is uniformly terrible. If it turned out that the special effects team also directed the movie, no one would raise an eyebrow.
    On second thought, if the special effects team had directed the movie, it would have been a lot better. The effects are the only thing that "The Final Destination" excels at because, overall, the movie is just an excuse to showcase them. The only special effect that fails to impress is the film's use of 3-D, which is obviously little more than a gimmick intended to draw large audiences.
    Despite its title, "The Final Destination" will probably not be this franchise's swansong. After this movie, audiences will have the sense to avoid anything with the moniker.