Final Destination 3 kills its cast in the order they would have died, and asks you to care anyway. It is the third film in the series, a standalone sequel directed by James Wong, who co-wrote it with Glen Morgan. Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays Wendy Christensen, a high school graduate who sees the Devil’s Flight roller coaster derail before it happens.
Trailer, via Warner Bros. Rewind.
The Devil’s Flight
The premise is the series’ best. Wendy boards the coaster at a Pennsylvania amusement park with her boyfriend Jason Wise, his best friend Kevin Fischer, Kevin’s girlfriend Carrie Dreyer, and their classmates. Her premonition shows a chain reaction that kills everyone. She talks Kevin, Ashley Freund, Ashlyn Halperin, Frankie Cheeks, Lewis Romero, and goth couple Ian McKinley and Erin Ulmer off the ride. Jason and Carrie stay. They die.
Wong stages the derailment with real weight. The problem is what comes after.
Photographs as a Death Map
Wendy took pictures at the park, and the images hold clues to how each survivor will die. She and Kevin use them to try to save the rest. It is a clever hook, and the film does almost nothing with it.
The deaths arrive in sequence. Ashley and Ashlyn burn in tanning beds. Frankie’s head is sliced by an engine fan from Kevin’s truck. Lewis is crushed by a weight machine at the school gym. Wendy saves Ian from falling stakes at a hardware store, so Death skips to Erin, who falls on a nail gun.
Each set piece is a machine with one moving part. You can see the fan, the weight, the nail gun long before they land.
Winstead Brings More Than the Script Asks
Wong said Winstead brought “a kind of soulfulness to her role as Wendy,” and that her character is “deeply affected by the accident” but strong enough to stay in control. He is right about the performance. He is describing a better film than the one around her.
Winstead and Ryan Merriman had just co-starred in The Ring Two. Merriman plays Kevin as the goofy best buddy Wong said he wanted. The goth couple, Ian and Erin, get the only real personality in the supporting cast. Everyone else is a name and a death.
A Standalone Sequel With Nothing to Stand On
Development started right after Final Destination 2. Jeffrey Reddick, who created the franchise and co-wrote the first two films, did not return. New Line executive Richard Bryner suggested the roller coaster. Wong and Morgan built the film around control as a theme.
That theme never gets past the premise. Wendy controls nothing. She reads photographs, she runs, she arrives late. The film’s own logic says fate wins, then asks you to cheer when she briefly doesn’t.
What the Series Lost
The first two films had Alex Browning and the Route 23 pile-up to build a mythology. Final Destination 3 mentions Browning and the pile-up, then drops them. It takes place six years after the first film and shares almost nothing with it.
The kills are the product here. They are inventive and they are empty. A tanning bed and a weight machine are punchlines, not scenes.
The Math
The runtime is 92 minutes. Metacritic sits at 41/100. The tagline promises “This ride will be the death of you.” It is.
Key facts
– Release: 2006
– Director: James Wong
– Runtime: 92 minutes
– Metacritic: 41/100
– Starring: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Ryan Merriman
Final Destination 3 has one great sequence and ninety minutes of waiting for the next one. Winstead deserved a film that trusted her half as much as Wong says he did.
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