The Final Destination (2009)

The fourth installment in a franchise devoted to the elaborate scheduling of human demise arrives with 3D as its chief novelty and little else on its mind. David R. Ellis returns to the director's chair he occupied for the second entry, and the film dutifully delivers what the brand promises: a speedway catastrophe, a series of Rube Goldberg executions, and a cast assembled largely to be unmade. Bobby Campo's Nick survives a premonition and spends the remainder of the runtime trying to outmaneuver a fate that has clearly read the script. It is grim, efficient, and utterly uninterested in saying anything.

The film's lone gesture toward the social questions of its moment is Mykelti Williamson's George Lanter, a security guard with a tragic past, and a white supremacist tow-truck driver who burns a cross on his lawn before being dragged to his death by his own chain. This is villain characterization, not thesis. The cross is a plot device with a payoff. Nobody in the film pauses to reflect on it, and the movie is better for that, if only because reflection would slow the machinery. Women appear, speak briefly, and are then fed into escalators and movie screens. The camera regards them with the same curiosity it grants a lawnmower.

There is no economic critique here, no environmental conscience, no instruction of any kind. The film wants to show us a carbon dioxide tank launching a man into a fence, and it does. Critics were unkind, audiences shrugged, and the picture nonetheless topped the domestic box office for two weekends, which tells us something about the autumn of 2009 that the film itself never bothers to. We are left with a clean specimen: a studio horror product that preaches nothing because it believes nothing, and is honest about it.