Final Destination 3 -- 2006 -- R

The latest installment of the FD franchise where death is the bad guy, and weird deaths are the bill of fare adds very little to the overall storyline. Basically, is you take the original Final Destination film and set it on a roller coaster without any adults, you have this film. The main difference is that one can conveniently look up the plot of the first film online and discover that people will die in the order they were supposed to be killed.

One thing this adds is that for some reason the leads play a minor role in nearly every death, usually by way of distraction or interference. In the first film, every death played out in an intricate series of apparent coincidences that caused the people to die. In FD3, the leads track down the next victim and seemingly inadvertently cause the person's death. It's not quite as cut and dry as the original was, and the deaths are not nearly as creative. There is one incredibly clever sequence in a hardware store, but most of the deaths are quickly done. There is usually a decent setup, but nothing that comes close to some of those in the original film.

In the end, it was a good movie, and did not shame the Final Destination franchise. It also had some good pacing, decent characters (for a horror flick), and a sensible plot. On the down side, it's strength was also its weakness in that it basically rehashed the first film with a slightly different scenario and different characters. The photographs were a nice addition, but really, it wasn't enough to distinguish itself.