A Crash, Some CGI, and Zero Soul: ‘The Final Destination’ Falls Flat

Some movies die with dignity. The Final Destination gets flattened by a CGI tire and then explodes in 3D.

Touted as the grand finale of the franchise (until it wasn’t), this fourth installment thought it could hide its lack of substance behind a pair of cheap sunglasses and a barrel of bad visual effects. Set at a racetrack—because vroom vroom equals danger, apparently—the film opens with a disaster sequence so over-the-top and plastic-looking it makes PlayStation 2 cutscenes look like Oppenheimer.

The characters? Forgettable cardboard cutouts. The dialogue? Painfully stiff. The acting? Let’s just say the true final destination here was a high school drama class. You’ll spend more time wondering how these people passed their driver's tests than fearing for their lives.

And then there’s the 3D—oh, the 3D. Every death is staged like a theme park ride gone wrong, with projectiles flying at the screen as if they were thrown by someone behind on their rent. It’s less scary and more like watching a DVD menu with a grudge.

Gone is the tension, the clever suspense, the mythos. In its place? A hollow shell of a film trying to cash in on the franchise name while forgetting everything that made the earlier entries compelling. Death doesn’t feel inevitable here—it feels bored.

In short, The Final Destination isn’t just the weakest link in the chain—it’s the point where the chain snaps entirely and smacks you in the face in gloriously tacky 3D. Thankfully, the series got back on track with Final Destination 5, but this entry remains the one that flatlined.