The Tragedy of Man is one of the most triumphant pieces of art that I have ever seen. Functionally eternal in scope, limitless in imagination, and infinitely evolving and revolving, it’s no wonder that the 160-minute film took 23 years to complete. It’s lavish in the extreme, inventive in ways that I hadn’t even imagined that an animated film (or any film) could be, and is a fantastically layered text that could take half a dozen viewings to even get the full breadth and scope of it. Even for a film this long, it’s even more dense than you’re imagining, as the spoken dialogue comes at you quickly and at a pace that verges on relentless (and which is occasionally full of thous and thees). This is unsurprising if one considers that it’s based on an 1861 play by Hungarian aristocrat and author Imre Madách, which was itself based on a previous work of his, a dramatic poem that was about four thousand words long. It’s a tale as old as time, as it opens on a celestial scene in which Lucifer argues with God about creation, citing himself as the primeval spirit of negation, the shadow that must exist because of his Creator’s light. He claims that humanity will aspire to become gods themselves in time, and God gives Lucifer his share of the world, which takes the form of the twin trees of Knowledge and Immortality.
You know how this story goes, and once the Fall occurs, Adam takes his first step into the apostasy of apotheosis by deciding that he will live on his own strength. As he and Eve find themselves living in a cave, he is never without Lucifer by his side, in various canine forms, man’s (false) best friend. Eventually, Adam demands that Lucifer follow through on the promised infinite Knowledge that he should have obtained from eating the fruit of temptation, so Lucifer does so by taking Adam on a spiritual journey that encompasses vast swaths of human history as Adam finds himself filling the role of various men of import throughout time. First is ancient Egypt, where Adam quantum leaps into Pharaoh Djoser in 2650 BC, where Eve takes the role of the wife of a slave who dies under the pharaoh’s demanding construction plans, with whom Djoser/Adam then falls in love, leading him to decide to abolish slavery. Lucifer, here appearing as Anubis in all of his dog-headed glory, tells him that history will still be a tapestry full of people enslaving one another, and that despite being as like a god as a man could be for that time, sand and time will reduce it all to nothing, and his proclamations of equality will change little, if anything. This will be the recurring theme of each of the time frames that Lucifer shows to Adam: mankind is on an eternal sinusoidal curve, and every time some kind of progress is made, it is inevitably corrupted because humans are savages at heart.
What I haven’t mentioned yet is that the above opening captures almost half a dozen different aesthetic art styles within those first plot developments. Lucifer and God’s conversation plays out in nebulous, colorful cosmos that represent all of existence and God’s permeation of every aspect of it, with Lucifer as a pure negative space within all of that firmament, like a silhouette animation. After the expulsion from Eden, Adam and Eve suddenly have hyperrealistic features, with everything being animated in a way that’s reminiscent of illustrated children’s books about cavemen. They’re honestly ugly to look at, and it works as an externalization of their fall from beings of perfected flesh to mortal meat. Much of the Egyptian segment is made up of flatly rendered images that evoke the stiff body language of hieroglyphic figures, but at other times it shows both the labor below and Djoser/Adam gazing upon it. And so, the art changes between (and within) different time periods, usually choosing and sticking to a color palette for each segment but not to one specific style. When Adam becomes Militiades in Greece during the 5th century BCE, the animation style takes on the appearance of the images emblazoned on Grecian pottery, and when he finds himself in first century Rome, gladiators battle it out in moving mosaics. The film never stops to let you catch your breath, and by the two-hour mark I was leaning forward in my seat in eager anticipation, metaphorically headlong.
Eventually, Adam’s journey catches up to the life and times of Christ, and he (and Eve) reconnect with God through him, embracing his message of love and fraternity, but they then watch in disappointed horror as Adam, in the form of Crusader Tancred, watches as the message that seemed poised to save mankind from itself falls into sectarian violence and strategy, with a debate between two branches of Christianity in the midst of a schism morphing into the shapes of the churches that they represent, which bash against each other until nothing is left but blood and bricks. With Adam then embodying Johannes Kepler in the seventeenth century (in a style of mostly monochromatic moving woodprints), it seems like scientific and rational progress will be the thing which leads humanity out of the darkness, only for Adam to then find himself in the stead of French Revolutionary figure Georges Danton, who is initially lauded for his anti-aristocratic stance but who finds himself executed when the mob considers him insufficiently radical. Adam finds himself wishing for a world in which society is organized along principles for the common good, and then he gets to see what that future will (or might) look like, in which all that remains of nature are the genetically modified beasts and flora and in which nations have been completely abolished. Of course, the end of nations has not meant the end of the state, as he learns quickly when he bears witness to a woman being severely punished when she refuses to hand her son over to the state for education and assignment to employment when he comes of age (he can’t be more than ten). Further in the future still, Adam is a giant floating in the void just beyond earth’s atmosphere, where machines arrive and replace his organic parts with mechanical ones that turn him into a humanoid spaceship, before he returns to see man’s end, in a distant ice age in which all that remains of Adam’s progeny are savages, but Lucifer argues that despite their bestial mutations, they are no different from humans of any other era, as people never fundamentally change.
In all of these situations, Lucifer always brings Adam to the end of an age of progress, showing or implying the inevitable backward swing of the pendulum that (we hope) always bends in an arc toward justice. It’s arguable that this can’t be helped; he is, after all, the embodiment of shadow and obfuscation, and so there’s no purpose in showing Adam how democracy is born when he can instead reveal how it dies. That role falls to Eve, who likewise appears in every segment to be the voice of reason and hope for the future to counterpose the fatalistic nihilism that Lucifer is sowing into her husband’s mind. She’s the widowed slave whose love of Djoser ends slavery (at least for a time), both a guillotined aristocrat and a pro-Terror prostitute in Revolutionary France, the faithful wife of Militiades and the unfaithful wife of Kepler, and she is the woman who refuses to allow the state to essentially kidnap her child in the materialist future. The film’s a little trite and old fashioned in the way that it treats gender, as Adam (and therefore men) is always the historic actor while Eve (and thus women) exists to pull him back from the edge of the abyss, over and over again, but given that the source material predates the Transcontinental Railroad, it’s understandable.
I can’t stress enough just what an amazing technical achievement this is. There are images from this that will stick with me forever. I can’t stop seeing the people of France dissolve into a great wave of red and blue that bears Danton/Adam aloft upon itself, or the shadow of the guillotine that is cast across his face. As the 20th century’s present comes into view, the endless gears of existence grind on, first as soldiers fall within the teeth of the cogs of the machine, followed by various pop culture figures as they replace the gods of eras past, and it feels like it could go on for the rest of time. And then it does. For all of its overt religiosity, there’s no denying that this is a monumental work of inarguable artistic relevance. At just under three hours, it’ll be a little while before I dig into it again, but I hope that it opens up for me even more when I find my way back to it again.
D.O.A. is a tight little noir thriller (#89 in Douglas Brode’s list in Edge of Your Seat, for those of you playing along at home) that’s one of the most perfect encapsulations of the genre. At 82 minutes, there’s almost no fat to be trimmed, and since it lapsed into the public domain years ago because of failure to renew the copyright, it’s accessible pretty much anywhere. Director Rudolph Maté, who would go on to helm When Worlds Collide just a year later, had risen through the ranks as a cinematographer, having earned his stripes on films as varied and well-remembered as Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc and Vampyr, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Foreign Correspondent, and the Rita Hayworth vehicle Gilda from director Charles Vidor. That eye for composition is striking in the film’s opening sequence, a minutes-long tracking shot that follows a man through a vast and echoey police station to find a particular detective so that he can report a murder: his own.
Frank Bigelow (Edmond O’Brien) is an accountant and notary public in the desert town of Banning, California, population about seven thousand at the time. His secretary, Paula (Pamela Britton) is madly in love with him, a situation that he seems disinterested in either quashing or pursuing. He springs the news to her that he’s taking a solo weekend trip to San Francisco, much to her disappointment, but there’s nothing she can do to stop him, and away he goes. Arriving at his lodgings, he discovers that the place is full of salesmen who have just wrapped up an annual conference and are holding various parties all over the hotel. The place is lousy with pretty ladies in expensive fur coats, and Frank seems more than ready to sow some oats hither and yon, but not before he returns Paula’s messages. She’s not pleased to hear all the caterwauling in the background, but she nevertheless dutifully reports that a man named Eugene Philips, an importer-exporter, had been desperately trying to reach him all afternoon, ending with the cryptic statement that if he didn’t talk to Frank right away “it would be too late.” Frank goes out with the salesmen from the room across the hall to a jazz bar, where the host’s wife starts to get a little too handsy, and he excuses himself to make small talk with a pretty blonde at the bar. Distracted, he doesn’t notice the lurking figure with his back to the camera surreptitiously slipping something into his drink. The next morning, he feels extremely ill and gets a terminal diagnosis; he’s ingested the “luminous toxin,” a poison with no antidote, and now he has only days left to live, not much time to find out who his killer is.
There’s a lot that happens in the first act of this one, which is great, since it means that the second and third acts move at a breakneck speed as Frank works to pull at all of the threads of a decently convoluted conspiracy and solve his own murder before he drops dead. Paula is a fascinating character, as she initially comes off as slightly off-putting, pestering Frank to the point of workplace sexual harassment. She insists that he take her out for a drink and is notably upset that Frank made plans for a weekend trip that didn’t include her, but she also seems to realize that this is Frank taking an opportunity to give himself one last weekend as a swinging bachelor before settling into a life with her in Banning. Upon awakening in San Francisco on Saturday morning, he’s clearly ready to go back and marry Paula, even before he learns that he’s dying. Once he tells her that he needs her, she shows up to act as his sidekick for the rest of the film, and there’s real affection there. The great tragedy may be that if she hadn’t been suffocating him so, he might not have felt the need to spend a weekend away from her, and then he wouldn’t have been poisoned. Alas. Not that it would have helped save Eugene Phillips, who was going to “commit suicide” that Friday night one way or another.
One of the other great tragedies in this has a major noir bent, which is the trope of the innocent man caught up in a dangerous web of lies and crime. For Frank, it comes down to a particular bill of sale that he notarized for Phillips months in the past, one that would have proved the dead man’s innocence. It’s not really spoiling much; the film’s electric energy all revolves around Frank going from place to place and getting answers that lead to more questions, all leading back to Phillips’s untimely demise. Who’s the real villain here? Is it Phillips’s brother, who was carrying on an affair with his sister-in-law? Is it Halliday, Eugene’s business partner? Is it the mysterious George Reynolds, whom no one seems to have ever seen and which may be no more than an alias? It’s a tight little mystery that’s completely streamlined. Just as Frank is running out of time, he grows increasingly frantic and desperate to find out who’s responsible for setting his death in motion and ensure that Paula is out of their reach, and the film feels similarly harried and headlong as it rushes toward the conclusion.
Maté’s is a name that one doesn’t hear bandied about in cinephile circles all that much. It can’t help that, looking at his CV, his filmography is all over the place. There are several films noir listed there, many of which seem intriguing even if I’ve never heard of them, like Union Station starring William Holden, Paula starring Loretta Young, and Forbidden starring Tony Curtis. But in the midst of those are a motley assortment of historical adventures (The Prince Who Was a Thief, The Black Shield of Falworth, and The 300 Spartans), romantic comedies (It Had to Be You, Sally and Saint Anne), Oscar bait (No Sad Songs for Me), and far, far too many Westerns to name. The man worked, and his talent is clear here, and I’m excited to see if I can track down some of his other noir and crime thrillers, even if I have no interest in Siege at Red River, The Far Horizons, or The Rawhide Years. The performances here are great as well, as O’Brien perfectly embodies a man who’s clearly been spending too much time helping farmers file their taxes and fending off Paula’s pawing at him and just needs to know he could still get a city girl’s number, even if he can’t follow through with ringing her up. Britton also walks a narrow tightrope here, needing to play Paula as written while also making her someone we find likable enough to root for her and Frank to get together. With such a short time commitment and widespread availability (it’s even on Tubi), D.O.A. is worth checking out.
While viewing the recent political satire Mountainhead, I kept thinking about that frequent online refrain that people use as a response whenever someone posts something conspiracy-addled or which otherwise blows the mind of the poster: “This must hit so hard if you’re stupid.” Mountainhead itself is not one of those movies, as for whatever issues one may have with it, it’s certainly not meant to appeal to the kind of people whose ignorance gives them delusions of intelligence; it’s a mockery of those people. Many lines that came out of the mouths of those characters felt like exactly the kind of thing that probably sounds very smart to very stupid people. I was also reminded of the phrase while watching the new action flick Ballerina, advertised as being “from the world of John Wick.” I’m fairly partial to the John Wick series, lumping the first three films together in the #40 slot on a list of my 100 favorite films of the 2010s (and later giving John Wick 4 a 4.5 star rating when it came out a couple of years ago). Even with that being said, that series and this spin-off are exactly the kind of films in which the plot exists solely to put the protagonist through the ringer and have them face off against hordes of killers, setting them up and mowing them down. The narrative choice of introducing a whole underworld society of assassins with their own rules, regulations, and responsibilities in the first film allowed for the franchise to let that choice of mythos grow (and perhaps even balloon and bloat). By the fourth film, we were introduced to the concept of “The Table” that oversees the whole masquerade, “Harbingers” who enforce their rules and customs, “Adjudicators” who investigate potential violations of the house rules of the Continental hotels, a vast network of intelligence operatives posing as panhandlers and led by “The Bowery King,” and the Ruska Roma, the organization that trained John Wick in his youth and which presents itself to the world as a premier dance theater and academy while disguising its role as a school for assassins. All of which probably hits so hard . . . if, well, you know the rest. But sometimes, it’s okay to dare to be stupid.
The last of these was introduced in John Wick 3, when Wick (Keanu Reeves) meets with The Director (Anjelica Huston) to call in a favor. Ballerina has been in the works since before that time, when Lionsgate purchased the first script from screenwriter Shay Hatten with the intent to adapt it as part of the John Wick series. Hatten was then brought on to write both JW3 and JW4, which allowed him to plant the seeds for Ballerina, with the film eventually being produced nearly ten years after initial conception, with Len Wiseman, director of the first two Underworld films and former husband of their star Kate Beckinsale. Wiseman also directed that Total Recall remake that everyone hated, which, when placed alongside the duds in Hatten’s writing resume (which includes three Zack Snyder partnerships, for Army of the Dead and parts one and two of Rebel Moon), does not give one the impression that Ballerina was destined for greatness. It more than succeeds, however, at carrying the torch of this series, and is the first big dumb blockbuster of the summer, which I mean with all due respect.
Javier Macarro (David Castañeda) is raising his daughter, Eve, in a large waterfront mansion home, where he dotes on and adores her. One night, their home is invaded by a man (Gabriel Byrne) who intends to kill Javier and return Eve to her mother’s family, citing that Javier had no right to steal her away. Javier manages to kill all of the man’s henchmen but their leader escapes, and Javier succumbs to his wounds. This prompts the arrival of Winston (Ian McShane), the manager of the New York Continental, who delivers Eve to the Tartakovsky Theatre and its Director, in the hopes that she might find her place in the world of assassins in which her father was raised. Twelve years later, Eve (Ana de Armas) has spent all of this time learning both ballet and the art of delivering death, although she’s struggling with the latter more than the former. After a pep talk from mentor Nogi (Sharon Duncan-Brewster) in which she is encouraged to “fight like a girl” (i.e., dirty), and when she eavesdrops on the conversation between John Wick and The Director in JW3 and then asks the man himself for advice, Eve starts to gain the upper hand over her opponents. After passing her final test, gets her first field deployment as an escort for the daughter of a rich man whose enemies may attempt to abduct and ransom her. After an impressive action sequence in an icy nightclub called -11, her getaway is foiled by the sudden appearance of an assassin whom she manages to subdue, discovering that he has the same scarification that her father’s would-be killers had. The Director refuses to reveal any information, which leads Eve to cash in on her connection to Winston, who points her in the direction of a mysterious man hiding out at the Continental in Prague (Norman Reedus) who might be able to tell her more.
Strangely enough for these movies, the mythbuilding that has occasionally been a stumbling block for the series as it grew is hamstrung here. We eventually learn that Byrne’s character is the “Chancellor” of a cult that makes its home in the seemingly quaint European mountain town of Hallstedt, but while we hear about this cult over and over again, we never get any real idea about what their beliefs or goals are. There’s an electrifying scene early on in which Eve is put to her final graduation test at the dance academy, which sees her put in a room at a table with two disassembled guns, and another woman (played by Rila Fukushima, who is always welcome on my screen) enters, clearly furious and distraught that she’s been reduced to “a test.” When Eve asks her who she is, she tells her that she’s Eve, “in ten years.” Then a timer starts and she starts assembling the gun and … all we know is that Eve passed. When arriving at Hallstedt, all we learn about the people living there is that (a) no one is allowed to leave, and (b) it appears to serve the purpose of some kind of retirement home for past killers, where they can settle down and raise children. Other than the fact that you can check out any time you like but can never leave, there’s no indication that the so-called “cult” has any foundational beliefs or ideologies, and there’s a real missed opportunity there. Also, since most of us have seen John Wick 4, we know that John is destined to die, and sooner than later. Here, the film gives us two potential endpoints for Eve’s journey that show she doesn’t have to follow the same path that he does—retirement or “retirement”—but the film doesn’t seem all that interested in developing either of these ideas. They might be saving it for the sequel, but as a man who always loves fiction with cults in it, I was a mite disappointed that we never learned that the cult worships a personification of Death or is preparing for some kind of evil version of the Rapture, or anything else that would make them a “cult” and not a convenience for the narrative. Even the familial connections that we learn Eve has in Hallstadt are pretty obvious and end up being pretty irrelevant within minutes of learning them, and it wouldn’t be a Hollywood script if Eve wasn’t offered something tempting to her followed by someone making the obvious joke (which probably hits so hard if you’re stupid).
The action here is stellar, as always. I was hoping that we would get to spend a little more time with Eve’s learning curve, and that is an element. The thing about John Wick is that he’s an unstoppable force. You might be able to slow him down a little but, but you can never stop him, and the franchise is built entirely around watching him utterly destroy everything that gets placed in front of him. It’s like the Mission: Impossible or Final Destination films in that way; you’re here to watch the same movie as last time and the time before that, and you’re going to like it. When I mentioned to a friend of mine that I was going to see this one, he said that he had tried to get into the first one and couldn’t, complaining “It’s just Keanu Reeves killing people,” and I replied that these are movies that are more concerned with the ballet of violence. Ballerina, naturally, is no different from the other John Wicks in that way, as we get to see Eve use a pair of ice skates in a way that Hans Brinker could never have imagined, tear through cultists with a flamethrower (ho ho ho), and utterly destroy a kill team that was foolish enough to bring guns to a grenade fight. While we do get to see her improve, it’s done in a fairly trite way, as Eve initially struggles to gain the upper hand in matches against her larger, male sparring partners, until Nogi tells her to “fight like a girl,” at which point she starts kicking dudes in the nuts and becomes the class’s top dog. It feels like a very 90s line and a very 90s cliché, but at least it gets a fun callback later when Eve, armed only with rubber bullets, shoots one of her attackers in the groin. Her evolution to killer happens fairly quickly over the course of a montage and by the time we see her in the field after a two-month jump, she’s almost unstoppable.
I suppose that this is better than watching her struggle a lot more than John does in his films, because the audience for these movies can trend a little toxic. I’m sure that the people who are already calling her a Mary Sue in some dark, roach-infested corner of the internet would have been complaining about her being a weak and ineffective hero in comparison to the unflappable Chad John Wick if we had gotten to see her spend a little more time on the road to becoming a finely tuned killing machine. Instead, the film plays it smart by showing us that Eve is fully dedicated and will push herself past her limits even when she falls short in her academic environment, such as it is, and then cuts to her displaying an almost John Wick-level of hypercompetence in the field of dealing death. Later, when her quest to avenge her father (and rescue a young girl whose father was willing to die to get her away from Hallstedt but who wasn’t as successful as Eve’s father) triggers a sharp exchange between the cult and the Roma Ruska with the promise of a war between them if Eve isn’t stopped, the Director calls in the favor John Wick owes her and sends him to Hallstedt. For her part, Eve is brave enough to try and fight him when he shows up on the scene, and although she’s giving it her all, it’s immediately clear that she’s completely outclassed by him. She’d be dead within moments if John wasn’t willing to hear her out and, sympathetic to her story, he gives her until midnight before he hunts her down. It’s a good balance that Eve seems just as implacable as John until she’s actually face-to-face with him in a combat situation and he’s completely unfazed, dodging her attacks without breaking a sweat.
Beyond the aforementioned lack of depth given to the cult, my other big complaint about this film is that there’s just not enough ballet for a movie called Ballerina. We see Eve dance as a child and her tragic memento of her dead father is a wind-up ballerina, but after the opening credits, the ballet doesn’t come up again until the end, when Eve wistfully watches a performance by a former classmate who washed out (and fell back on her dream career of being a ballerina). I was really hoping that there would be a lot more dance-inspired action happening here, as would befit the title and concept. The film does seem more hesitant to show de Armas shooting people while Reeves was doing lots of gun-fu in his outings, which stood out to me a lot when her kit for her first mission is a non-lethal gun. We get to see her shoot a few people in Hallstedt, but until that point, we’re mostly limited to hand-to-hand combat, improvised weapons, and a whole lot of grenadery. I initially thought that this might be some old-fashioned Hollywood sexism happening in that they presume we won’t tolerate women being as violent as we allow men to be, but later in the film she burns dozens of men and women to death without flinching, which is even more horrific, so I’m not really sure. But given how much combat happened in the first half of the movie, would it have hurt to have Eve doing some pirouettes or en pointes somewhere to make her fighting style more distinct from John’s? In the moment in which she finds herself with a pair of skates in a boathouse and standing on the ice below the dock, I got terribly excited that we were about to see some ice dancing/fighting, but instead she just slices and dices. That’s all well and good (and hits hard if stupid), but it felt like a missed opportunity. This film could have been called Equestrian: From the World of John Wick and been about a girl’s riding academy that was secretly a cover for murder training and the effect on both the plot and the action would be negligible. If we go back to this well again, maybe we’ll get to see it next time.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Luis Buñuel’s surrealist satire The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), in which a small party of upper-class snobs are repeatedly deprived of their dinner.
I’ve never seen Succession, so I wasn’t terribly interested when I heard that the show’s creator had written and directed a new direct-to-HBO feature, but I found myself on a couch watching it with friends on a lazy Sunday afternoon after a dip in a municipal pool. Of the five of us, two of them had already watched it within the past couple of days and were excited to watch it again, one of whom was Erstwhile Roommate of Boomer, who described the film as having one of the funniest sequences he had ever seen in a movie. After this declaration, he expressed that he hoped he hadn’t hyped it up too much. This did turn out to be probably the funniest movie I’ve seen so far this year, although general audiences don’t seem to be connecting with it.
Hugo Van Yalk (Jason Schwartzman), known to his “friends” as “Souper,” has invited the rest of said quartet to his recently constructed mansion, Mountainhead, in the remote mountains of Utah. The group, which calls themselves the “Brewsters” (presumably a play on Brewster’s Millions), consists of mega-wealthy a-holes who only have a few rules for when they get together for a boys’ retreat: “no deals, no meals, no high heels,” which is to say snacks only, no business, and no women. Despite the “no deals” disclaimer, Souper plans to use the time together to pitch the other three on investing in his meditation app, which he continuously and defensively insists is a “total wellness superapp.” The patriarch of the group is Randall Garrett (a pleasantly salt-and-peppered Steve Carrell), who has recently received a cancer diagnosis that gives him five to fifteen years, but don’t let that make you overly sympathetic to him right out of the gate. The two remaining members, Venis “Ven” Parish (Cory Michael Smith) and Jeff Abredazi (Ramy Youssef), are currently at odds with one another, as Jeff’s currently riding a rising tide made out of dollar bills as algorithm software that he invested in is seeing a major return at the same time that Ven’s 4-million user social networking app has just released a (too) powerful AI that’s literally breaking the internet.
As the first order of business, we must establish that everyone here (with the possible exception of Jeff) is very, very stupid. They use a great deal of tech-based neologisms and throw around the names of philosophers like Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Søren Kierkegaard as supposed sources for their personal philosophies (although Souper doesn’t seem to be able to graduate past Ayn Rand, given that his obsession with The Fountainhead influenced the name of the home for which the film is titled, with a copy sitting on a nightstand in one of the house’s many bedrooms). It’s clear from their feigned eloquence that they have, at best, secondhand knowledge of these schools of thought from pared-down excerpts that appear in the kind of pop-psych self-help/business fusion books that legions of “self-made men” are forever recommending to one another. They are society’s rotten creme which has risen to the top through lucky breaks, access to generational wealth, and stolen labor, and upon seeing themselves exalted to this position believe that they did so through some innate, unique specialness. We see this right off the bat when Randall, getting (at least) a second opinion that aligns with his previous doctors’ terminal diagnosis, insults his current oncologist’s intelligence directly to his face. Anger is just as normal a part of grief as denial is, but instead of raging against the heavens or the dying of the light, Randall defaults to personal degradation of someone who is, at a minimum, an order of magnitude more intelligent than himself. He’s so smart, you see? Intelligence makes money and since he has the most money, that makes him the most smartestest.
Perhaps the worst among the crew is Ven, who is a borderline psychopath and, worse, their Elon Musk equivalent. His social network Traam has the exact same user interface, has tasked himself with moving mankind toward the singularity, and has a relationship with his oddly-named son Sabre that is so lacking in paternal qualities that it verges on being inhuman. He also hints at his belief in Simulation Theory in a conversation with Randall in which they both express that they don’t believe that there are really eight million real people in the world, and his desperation to seem approachable and well-humored makes him more alien and unlikable. At one point, he attempts to smile like a normal person and ends up looking like Conrad Veidt in The Man Who Laughs. Most tellingly, he has no reaction to the fact that Traam’s new AI platform is causing the end of the world while these four assholes are snowmobiling up to a mountain peak together to write their net worth on their chests and howl into the sky. Randall and Souper are likewise largely unphased by the breakdown of society, at their metaphorical and geographical remove from the real-world consequences of what Ven and Traam have wrought. Social media becomes inundated with AI-generated perfect deepfakes of everything from messages from loved ones to literal fake news; a man with a grudge against his neighbor can stir up a lynch mob to carry out his personal grievances in half an hour by quickly creating a video of a newscast calling the man as a pedophile. Literal wars break out globally as computer generated images of invasions along borders prompt real responses from governments and militaries, and Ven celebrates as his bank account swells.
If there’s anyone here who has a speck of decency, it’s Jeff, as he’s rightfully horrified about the imminent downfall of nation states, while the others spitball the idea of a coup to establish their dominance in the world that is to come. Some of this is due to his anxiety about his girlfriend attending a sex party in one of the hot zones and his concern about her (a) survival and (b) fidelity, but he also has a moral framework that the others are completely lacking. He’s no saint, though, as his and Jeff’s falling out was over Jeff’s hiring of several of Ven’s programmers, who then went on to develop the exact content moderation algorithm that Ven needs, but for Jeff’s company instead. Selling the algorithm to Ven for Traam would at least prevent more new violence from breaking out, but he refuses to consider it, even as Rome (and D.C., and Buenos Aires, and Paris, and Melbourne …) burns. He does reach a point where he confesses to Randall that he’s thinking about turning the AI over to the real authorities so that they can try and put a cap on all this apocalyptic business, but this goes over poorly, and that’s when the film gets really interesting.
I wasn’t terribly impressed with Guy Maddin’s Rumours last year, and although that one was about G7 leaders rather than four men with more riches than the pharaohs of old, the “Powerful people converge in a remote location while the world is ending over every horizon” structure is quite similar. Whereas that one is both too gentle in its handling of its characters and too broad in their characterization, Mountainhead goes full-tilt into making the Brewsters complete—and very specific—pieces of shit so that the movie can play around with people’s fates since there’s no real reason to root for any of these people for most of the runtime. By the time three of them turn on the other, the plot kicks into high gear with slapstick taking over, and although it never loses the witty dialogue of the first half, the film definitely picks up in the second half. One of my viewing companions mentioned to me after the film that he didn’t really enjoy it until this mid-film shift, and I can’t say that I blame him. Most of the film’s humor comes from the counterpoint between the Brewsters’ unflappable internal sense of entitlement and self-adulation and the external reality that they are all sad, sick men whose superiority complexes and narcissism mask deep neuroses and fatal flaws. It’s easy to get lost in their constant use of business buzzwords, but this also means that the film lends itself to an easy rewatch to pick up on even more of the rapid-fire nonsense that the leads spit out. It’s so fast that even though I rarely stopped laughing for much of the runtime, the bons mot were coming so furiously that few of them managed to embed themselves. It’s a movie that could easily become overquoted in the future, but is solidly funny in the moment. My favorite was probably Randall’s insistence that “We’re not talking about killing [character], we’re talking about killing a non-fungible human being who is identical to [character],” which really speaks for itself.
After getting out of my afternoon screening of The Phoenician Scheme, I texted Brandon that it might have hit my top three Wes Anderson films right out of the gate (although on later reflection it’s more safely in the top five), and he replied that it had been largely dismissed out of Cannes as a minor work from him. Within days, I stumbled upon this tweet and sent it to Brandon; in case it disappears, it reads “Oh, did another Wes Anderson film premiere to a muted response at Cannes only to turn out to be another masterpiece? I guess it’s summer again.” I mentioned last year in discussions around Asteroid City that I think Anderson is a filmmaker that we have started to take for granted, even if I personally didn’t care much for The French Dispatch (which Brandon reviewed very positively here). There was much consternation about Asteroid City among some of the people that I ran into at a Friendsgiving in November, and I mostly kept my opinion to myself. It’s a movie that requires you to get on its level and is the only one of his films that I would describe as genuinely surreal. If you didn’t like or get it, then I don’t know that I really have the language to articulate what about it spoke so clearly and effectively to me, or that “getting it” would automatically translate to “liking it.” What I will say is that Asteroid City is far from being an entry level Anderson film, or one with broad general appeal, and that The French Dispatch is also not one that I think should be anyone’s first. The Phoenician Scheme, however, with its mostly straightforward narrative structure, is one that I think will be of interest to a larger audience and range of viewers.
Zsa-Zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro) is an international arms dealer and industrialist who finds himself surviving the most recent of numerous attempts on his life when his plane goes down in 1950. Unlike in his previous miraculous survivals, any of which may have taken the lives of his three dead wives, this time he undergoes a near death experience in which he faces divine judgment regarding his heavenly worthiness. Somewhat shaken by this, Korda reaches out to the eldest of his ten children and only daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton, Kate Winslet’s daughter), who is a novice preparing to take her final vows to become a nun. Although it’s been years, he offers to provisionally make her the heir to his empire, which would be flattering if all of her brothers weren’t children aged three to fifteen (Korda has adopted several in addition to his biological sons, in case all of his genetic progeny turn out to be duds). Further complicating matters is the widespread belief that Liesl’s mother, Korda’s first wife, was killed at his hands, and although he vehemently denies that he has ever directly or indirectly committed murder, his ongoing recognition of a large number of assassins whom he previously employed calls his veracity into question. Not to mention that he is completely unencumbered by any apparent ethical limitations, as his most recent and greatest work, an infrastructural overhaul of the fictional nation of Phoenicia, will require the use of slave labor, and that he claims responsibility for a famine in the area that’s destabilized local power structures in order for him to have his way. Although Liesl’s devotion to her faith calls her to return and take her vows, her own morals demand that she take the opportunity to agree to Korda’s offer on the condition that there are no more famines or slaves (and that her brothers are moved from a dormitory across the street into Korda’s gigantic mansion, and that some level of paternal attentiveness is provided for them).
For all his many, many flaws as a father and a human being, Korda has an endless thirst for knowledge, which includes the hiring of numerous tutors on various subjects to provide extemporaneous lectures to the boys and himself. The most recent of these is Norwegian entomology professor Bjørn Lund (Michael Cera), who ends up along for the ride serving as Korda’s new administrative secretary (the last one died in the plane crash that opened the film). Korda lays out the movie’s overarching plot quickly and in detail. Due to actions on the part of Korda’s industrial enemies, market manipulation of the cost of “bashable rivets” has suddenly created a funding gap for the whole titular scheme, so he must convince all of the other investors in his project to cover some percentage of “The Gap.” These include Phoenicia’s crown prince Farouk (Riz Ahmed), the brother duo of venture capitalists Leland (Tom Hanks) and Reagan (Bryan Cranston), Korda’s second cousin Hilda Sussman-Korda (Scarlett Johansson), Casablanca-inspired nightclub owner and gangster Marseille Bob (Mathieu Amalric), and “Uncle” Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch), Korda’s estranged half-brother. As Korda meets with each of them in turn, he finds himself returning to Heaven’s courtroom, where he is defended by an attorney named Knave (Willem Dafoe) before God (Bill Murray) and interacts with Liesl’s mother (Charlotte Gainsbourg) in her afterlife. Under the guidance of Liesl’s moral certitude and with things not going well for him “upstairs,” Korda grows as a person despite never losing his sardonic edge.
The set pieces that comprise this one are all a lot of fun. When I was telling a friend about it, the one with whom I had watched so many Final Destination films, I noted that this movie opened almost like one of those would, with an airplane blowing out part of its fuselage and a man being ripped in half as a result, except that it’s done in a typically Andersonian visual style, with string and stop motion bits in place of fire and guts, and it sets a great tone for what is to follow. Even while using his standard palette, Anderson is doing a few new things, including using a very shallow depth of field in several wide shots of the massive room in which Korda reunites with his daughter, which causes the image to appear diorama-like until people enter and the illusory spell is broken. It’s fun stuff, and calls to mind the experimental playfulness on display in, for instance, the tour of the submarine in The Life Aquatic. The aforementioned surreality of Asteroid City is not completely absent here, although it’s limited to the scenes in which Korda finds himself at his out of body inquest and its various asides, and they’re very funny; there’s something a bit Mel Brooks about the whole celestial spectacle, which I mean as a great compliment. They’re also much more palatable, as I can imagine the average moviegoer—a “normie” for lack of a better term—showing up to Asteroid City and being completely put off by some of the more esoteric choices, especially with regards to the “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep” refrain that occurs near the film’s ending. Here, confining the more dreamlike elements of the piece to these near-death visions posits them in a rhetorical space that demands less suspension of disbelief (and which contains, perhaps, less whimsy) and is likely going to be more acceptable to the standard viewer. As such, The Phoenician Scheme could easily function as a very good introduction to Anderson’s body of work, since it’s much more straightforward approach would have a broader appeal.
Del Toro is excellent in this, giving a truly outstanding performance. Korda is a bit of an Andersonian archetype in that his treatment of his children is absurd in the way it finds comedy in its outlandish neglectfulness. This, along with his desire for familial reconciliation, makes him a figure very much like Gene Hackman’s Royal Tenenbaum, but with a bit of a twist. Whereas Royal had a desire to reconnect with his family that was almost entirely selfish and self-interested and he was willing to fake having a terminal illness to get in close, Korda is the ultimate capitalist robber baron who seems to have never cared about anyone other than himself (and perhaps Liesl’s late mother) but who has a large, unloved family that he has no real desire to connect to (like certain other billionaires we could name). He seems more interested in having a family because he’s expected to have some kind of legacy, even if he hadn’t given much thought to what that could mean until he survives his seventh plane crash. There’s a great scene in the “Marseille Bob” segment of the film in which said gangster’s night club is invaded by socialist revolutionaries led by Richard Ayoade, and Korda gets into the middle of things and ends up shot by a trigger-happy rebel. Bob mistakes this accident as a sign of Korda’s nobility and immediately agrees to cover a part of The Gap, and although Korda clearly takes advantage of this error, Del Toro plays the moment as if the motor-mouthed cad is slightly taken aback at how good it feels for someone to believe you’re capable of change. There’s a talent to adding that kind of nuance in both performance and direction without skipping a beat in the dizzyingly-fast dialogue.
As a counterpoint to all of this, we see Liesl slowly let go of the trappings of faith while retaining her sense of self (there’s a great bit where she admits she’s never heard God’s voice but that she imagines that she does, and He just tells her to do what she was going to do anyway). First, as a rider to her accepting provisional heirship, Korda has her give up her humble rosary for a “secular” one, which is gaudy and covered in jewels. Later, she is given a more ornate replacement for her corncob pipe, which is even tackier. When she tries to return to her order, the Mother Superior tells her that these worldly possessions (which she did not seek but merely received) indicate that she is among those who are simply not cut out for a life of cloistered humility spent in prayer. Part of the film’s genuine heart is finding out where Liesl and her father are going to meet in the middle, and the film is filled with objective correlative metaphors for this in the number of images of things which don’t quite connect, most notably a railway gap of about twenty feet that ends up becoming a makeshift basketball court (it makes sense in context).
Where the film fumbled somewhat was with the Uncle Nubar character. Cumberbatch is done up in intentionally ridiculous facial hair, and he looks a bit like Ming the Merciless if he stopped grooming or conditioning his mustache and beard and let the whole situation get a little scraggly. It’s a little much, and Cumberbatch’s performance is at first a hard pill to swallow, but by the time he and Korda get into a knock-down drag-out fight, I had come around on it. Some people in my screening were enjoying it from the start, and what I noticed at this movie (which was actually the same theater in which I saw Asteroid City last year) was that it shared that film’s propensity to elicit laughs from different parts of the audience at different times. The jokes come at such a rapid pace that sometimes you just have to give yourself over to the music of the dialogue, and the guy six seats over is laughing at something that you’ve missed and the couple behind you are getting a lot more out of Cumberbatch than you are while you’re laughing at something that it seems like only one other person enjoyed. In my screening, there was one man one row in front of me and two seats over who fell asleep almost immediately and then snored for the remaining 90 minutes. A comedy that’s able to be funny to different people in different ways (and a great movie to take a nap to for that guy in Row C) is laudable, and isn’t to be taken for granted.
Watching all of those Final Destination movies in a single week must have rewired my brain, because I spent the first forty minutes of Drop waiting for a huge disaster to occur. After the film opens on a flashback to protagonist Violet (Meghann Fahy)’s final altercation with her violent, abusive husband as her infant watches, we cut forward to the present, where she is planning to go on her first date since then, leaving her now Pre-K aged son Toby with her sister, Jen (Violett Beane). This is the first time she and her son have been apart, and she’s understandably nervous. As we have all already seen this trailer (presumably many times), we know that on this date she is going to begin receiving airdropped directions to do something awful to her companion, we spend the first several minutes after her arrival to the (begging to be a Final Destination location) restaurant meeting all of the potential subjects. There’s Matt (Jeffrey Self), the UCB hopeful and waiter who’s on his first shift and whose oversharing about his sketch ideas may be either an actual annoying character trait or a cover for his activities; there’s pianist Phil (Ed Weeks), who attempts to hit on Violet sleazily before he’s warned off by bartender Cara (Gabrielle Ryan), who seems very invested in Violet’s first date; there’s Richard (Reed Diamond), a nervous man who approaches Violet thinking that she might be the blind date he’s been set up with before meeting his actual date; there’s also Connor (Travis Nelson), a handsome man that Violet bumps into on two separate occasions, which may have given him access to clone her phone; and finally the hostess (Sarah McCormack), whose access to all of the security cameras gives her a bird’s eye view that may be what’s enabling Violet’s harassment. By the time her date, Henry (Brandon Sklenar), arrives, we’ve got quite the list of potential suspects to keep us guessing about who’s behind the home invasion that Violet witnesses on her phone via her home security cameras, with the threat against Jen and Toby used to force Violet to steal from Henry and potentially murder him.
The date starts casually enough, with Henry having the patience of multiple saints as Violet keeps checking her phone fairly constantly throughout the date, which she attributes to separation anxiety from her son. She shares the first couple of things that are airdropped to her with Henry; they’re mostly memes to get her attention, but quickly turn into threats and directions to destroy a memory card that Henry, who is the mayor’s photographer, has in his camera bag. This is the first clue that we get to the purpose of the unknown dropper’s motives, as we see there are photos of some documents which may point to corruption in Chicago’s upper echelons. Once this is complete, she’s directed to retrieve something from the paper towel dispenser in the ladies’ room, which turns out to be a vial of poison that she must use against Henry. It’s all a fairly tense affair, and it’s fun to watch Violet figure out reasons to keep going back to the washroom or direct Henry to help her look for her watch, while she also tries to figure out how to ask for help despite her every movement being monitored. The final climax of the film goes for a full-on action sequence as the identity of the dropper is revealed and Violet manages to get the upper hand, but not before they direct their accomplice to kill Jen and Toby, which means Violet has to race home and try to stop the assassin, in a mirror of her first scene in which her husband threatened her and baby Toby with a handgun.
This is a pretty decent premise, and one that’s followed through upon well. It bears mentioning that the narrative has a lot of the same plot beats as the 2005 Wes Craven picture Red Eye starring Rachel McAdams and Cillian Murphy. In that flick, McAdams’s character is a hotel manager who is blackmailed under threat of deadly violence against her father into moving a political appointee into a specific suite so that Murphy’s terrorist organization can complete an assassination. Like Violet, she too experienced a horrific event just a couple of years earlier that left her unwilling to give up, and the fury of which she channels into attacking her aggressor before rushing home to save her threatened family. Both films are very much of their era, as the earlier film explicitly labels Murphy a domestic terrorist and the object of his violence is associated with the Department of Homeland Security, making it a clear example of Bush era domestic terror politics. In this one, not only is the target of the killer’s ire someone who’s looking to expose corruption (and therefore automatically a hero), but the film’s entire gimmick centering around the whole “airdrop” smartphone element feels like a premise that should have been done a couple of years ago when that was a newer feature. One gets the feeling that this one will seem just as much like an unintentional period piece as Red Eye in just a few years, although I’m not certain it will have the same punch two decades from now that Red Eye still does today.
Fahy is great here, and it’s fun to see her again after her stellar run on the second season of White Lotus, especially since she was also in the much maligned The Unbreakable Boy earlier this year, which had the misfortune of shooting in 2022 and then being shelved until after Fahy gained more recognition. Sklenar is attractive as Henry and definitely fits the mold of a handsome leading man, but I couldn’t help but notice how much chemistry Violet and Cara had from the outset, and in between wondering when the penthouse restaurant was going to fall out of the sky like the opening scene of Final Destination: Bloodlines, I kept thinking that Violet should just skip her date and make out with Cara instead. Even when my suspicions fell on Cara as the airdropper (or a conspirator thereof), I was still kind of rooting for a sapphic resolution to the story.
This is exactly the kind of mid-budget thriller that movie studios used to churn out at a rate of a dozen a year, a quickly cobbled together script that took some recent tech news item and ran with it to craft a thriller around, usually relying on the audience’s general lack of tech savvy to be effective. I’ve never owned an iPhone and thus have never sent or received an airdrop (although they are careful to never use any of Apple’s branded products or tech names and even their use of the fiery Elmo meme replaces the Muppet with a generic stuffed animal), so I have no idea how plausible or implausible this is as a technological MacGuffin. I saw this with a few friends, some of whom are iPhone users, and they mentioned that this would have been more believable several years ago before everyone turned off the default airdrop “receive” setting, as most folks have stopped accepting airdrops as it largely became a method for pervs and other creeps to spam a given area with unsolicited dick pics. I have to take their word for it. For a nice, easy thriller that doesn’t require too much mental energy, Drop is decent, and fun enough for what it is.
I was in the minority of people who saw Talk to Me in 2022 and felt indifferent toward it. Most people either loved or hated it (Brandon enjoyed it), and while I thought the ending (and I do mean the very ending, like the last minute or so) was novel and fresh, I found the overall experience to be a fairly rote possession story with little to make it stand out. When I heard that the directors, twins Danny and Michael Philippou, had a new feature coming out, I didn’t pay much attention to it despite it getting the same kind of word-of-mouth hype that Talk to Me had. Brandon asked me if I was interested in this one and I didn’t even know what he was talking about, but it wasn’t until the movie got the approval of a couple who work at my local coffee shop (hi, Michael and Brandon P.!) that I gave this one any serious consideration. I bought the tickets for me and my viewing companions in person in advance (the only way to make sure that you both get the Tuesday discount and that the tickets don’t sell out), and the theater employee nervously asked me what I had heard about the film as I was paying. I told her I hadn’t really heard anything, and she said that people had been coming out of the film talking about how frightening and gory it was, and that she wasn’t sure she would see it. After those two incidents, I was pretty excited, and I can say I was definitely not disappointed.
Piper (Sora Wong) is the visually impaired younger stepsister of loving, caring Andy (Billy Barratt), and the apple of her father’s eye. Coming home one day, Andy discovers his father’s dead body lying on the bathroom floor, the shower still running, and although he tries to keep Piper away, his own shock prevents him from stopping her from touching the corpse. Andy’s not quite eighteen and thus can’t take guardianship of Piper, so child services places her with a woman named Laura (Sally Hawkins), who recently lost her own daughter, Cathy. Cathy shared Piper’s visual impairment, so her home is already set up with many of the accommodations that Piper would need, like taped-down rugs. Andy, afraid of losing Piper, begs social worker Wendy (Sally-Anne Upton) to convince Laura to take him in for the next few months until he can take guardianship of Piper on his birthday. Wendy cites that Laura has had bad experiences with other foster children with a past history of violence, obliquely alluding to something in Andy’s past, but is ultimately successful in keeping the step-siblings together with Laura for the time being. Upon arrival, however, Andy is immediately treated as extraneous and unwanted; Laura calls him “Anthony” and “Andrew,” and while Piper gets set up in Cathy’s untouched bedroom, Andy gets plopped in a room that’s mostly been used for storage, stuck on a mattress that’s too short for him, directly on the floor, and an accordion pocket door that neither closes nor locks. Laura is also fostering another child whom she introduces as Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), who exhibits odd behavior that the audience initially dismisses as a response to trauma in whatever home he has been taken from, but which could be something more sinister.
This is a great set-up, and goes in some really great directions from there. Before we meet Piper and Andy, we are treated to a scene on a VHS tape in which various people speak Russian and there appears to be some kind of possession or exorcism ritual being performed, which includes one of the participants being “confined” within a white ring of some kind. When we see that there is a white line that Andy and Piper have to cross in order to approach Laura’s house, we’re immediately clued in that something fishy is afoot, even before we get to witness the discrepancy in the way that Laura treats her two new fosters. The gaslighting of Andy (and, to a lesser extent, Piper) begins almost immediately, as Laura deliberately ostracizes her new foster son, completely disregards his privacy by reading his text messages (above and beyond sticking him a room that he can’t even lock the door of), and even pouring her own urine on him while he sleeps heavily as a result of Laura drugging his workout powder so that he believes he’s wet the bed. It’s clear that she knows just how to manipulate a young person who doesn’t have the proper vocabulary to explain their situation to the authorities, and she uses her knowledge as a former social worker herself to goad him into aggressive behavior in order to plant the seed of the idea that he will be a poor guardian for Piper in the minds of both the girl herself and Wendy the social worker. Not simplifying matters is the fact that although Piper loved and adored her stepfather, Andy’s relationship was more complicated, as their father took his aggression out solely on his son while pampering his stepdaughter. When both were much younger, this resulted in Andy repeating that violence by physically striking Piper in an incident that she doesn’t remember but which he regrets and seeks to make amends for every day. Andy’s kindness and selflessness comes through in the way that he attempts to bond with Oliver when Laura takes Piper out for a “girls’ day,” although things go completely awry in a way that he couldn’t have foreseen, because he doesn’t yet realize that he’s in a supernatural horror story.
Skip to the next paragraph to avoid spoilers (although they were probably the same ones as in the trailer)! Unfortunately, Laura is simply too well trusted within the social services to fall under suspicion until it’s too late. I don’t want to give too much away here since this is such a recent release and one that I think people should seek out and see for themselves, but there is a demonic entity present in the house and trapped inside of Oliver that Laura intends to use as a conduit to resurrect her daughter in exchange for Piper. (At least one person who edited the TV Tropes page for the film is operating under the assumption that Oliver is possessed by Cathy, but there are several visual indicators about what’s really happening that they must have missed.) It’s not simply that Laura wants Piper around to act as a kind of replacement for Cathy, but that she has ulterior motives that require her to isolate Piper, and Andy is standing in her way.
This one is very effective, both in onscreen frights and in its somber tone. Expectations are effectively subverted. Throughout the film, much is made of Andy’s consistent workout routine and the bench presses that he does, but when the time comes that all of this would be most effective in saving him, he does not succeed. I got plenty of warnings about this one’s gruesome content, and I might be tipping my hand too much that I’ve been completely desensitized, but I will say that if you’re a horror fan, you’ll largely have seen much of this before, even if it’s still effective here. If you’re prone to gum/mouth/teeth nightmares, be forewarned that this one is going to set off some of those phobias. More important than all of that, however, is that this film effectively forges an emotional connection with the audience. There’s a little white lie that Andy tells Piper at the beginning of the movie to help her deal with her grief, and when that was called back to at the end of the film, I’m man enough to admit that I teared up. This one’s a real knockout.
I went into my viewing of Final Destination: Bloodlines not having seen a single frame of any of the franchise entries in over twenty years, only being familiar with the first one from early high school sleepovers and having seen the opening (and only the opening) of the first sequel when it first hit Blockbuster shelves. Watching this one prompted me to go down a rabbit hole of watching the entire series over the course of a week, and although I wouldn’t say that binge retroactively gave me more appreciation for this one necessarily, I do think that it moved up in my rankings for a latecomer entry into an almost abandoned franchise.
Back in the 1960s, young Iris (Brec Bassinger) has just learned that she’s pregnant, on the eve of a big date with her boyfriend Paul, who has managed to score reservations for a night at a recently completed Space Needle-style restaurant. Despite some difficulties getting in, the two still have a romantic time together, and Paul proposes to her while the two stand on an outdoor observation deck. Things quickly take a turn for the worse when a penny tossed over the side of the building by an unattended child gets sucked into the restaurant’s vents, creating a chain reaction that cascades from a shattered glass dance floor to an explosion of various gases to an elevator collapse to the destruction of the stairs. It’s bad. Iris manages to be the second to last to die, protecting herself and the young son of the venue’s lounge singer until the very last moment, when she dies (followed, presumably, by the kid). This turns out to be a premonition, however, and she manages to save a huge number of people from dying by getting them off of the dance floor before it collapses, and getting everyone evacuated.
If you’re familiar with this film franchise’s (very loose) mythology, then you know that this means that Death personified is now pissed that its “design” was cheated, and it will now seek out and kill everyone who survived, in the order they “should” have died. This film adds a new wrinkle, however. Due to the large number of survivors, many of them went on to have children and start families, all of whom only exist because the plan was diverted, which means that Death has to prune the entire family tree of each survivor before moving to the next person on its list. It’s taken decades to tick off every box, and now the last remaining branches from the Space Needle survivors are Iris’s children and grandchildren, which is where we pick up in the present. College student Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) keeps having the same nightmare, about a woman named Iris saving dozens of people from a building collapse. Theorizing that the woman in her visions may be her estranged grandmother, she goes home to her father and brother, Charlie (Teo Briones), and while the reception from her father is warm, Charlie gives her the cold shoulder, clearly seeing a similarity in Stefani’s distance from her family and their earlier abandonment by their mother, Darlene (Rya Kihlstedt). Stefani’s father tries to warn her not to start asking questions about Iris, citing that she had made the lives of both her children, Darlene and Howard, miserable. Although she adjusted to her life after the near disaster initially, she later became obsessed with seeing “patterns” and was preoccupied with thoughts of death, and her seemingly unhinged protectiveness warped both of her kids.
Ignoring him, Stefani immediately goes to the home of Uncle Harold, where we meet the cousins. Erik (Richard Harmon) is the eldest, a tattoo artist with his own extensive body art and piercings, with prim high school athlete Julia in the middle and fully grown adult man Bobby (Owen Patrick Joyner) rounding them out as the apparent youngest despite being, as noted, a grown ass man (they put him in a lot of oversized sweaters and backwards caps, but the effect isn’t convincing so much as it is confusing). I think we’re supposed to believe that Charlie and Bobby are about the same age, but it doesn’t work. When Uncle Harold kindly but firmly rejects Stefani’s questions, her aunt indirectly points her in the direction of a box of family records, which Stefani uses to locate the last known location of Iris, a bizarre fortress that Iris has constructed for herself and meets her grandmother. She learns about the family history and is given a book that traces the history of all of the restaurant disaster survivors and their descendants, revealing that Iris is apparently the last, and that once she’s dead Death will track down Howard and his progeny in order, followed by Darlene and her two kids. As is always the case, no one believes Stefani at first, but as more deaths occur around them, the remaining Campbells must try and work together to see if there’s a way to get off of Death’s list.
Where the film is weak is in its main character. Stefani is kind of boring, and you’re never really all that invested in her success. I don’t normally like to denigrate performers in these reviews, but Santa Juana brings very little to the table. Looking at her filmography, she’s only ever been in a couple of episodes of The Flash and the few film credits she has are for movies that aren’t even notable enough to have Wikipedia pages. On stage, she was the understudy for a role in a Canadian production of Dear Evan Hansen, and “understudy” is exactly how I would describe her performance. It’s like the studio saw the success of the two most recent Scream sequels and said, “Get us a Melissa Cabrera type,” and she just happened to fit the visual mold that they were seeking. I’m not trying to be mean, but it’s hard to believe that she auditioned for this role rather than being selected based solely on her headshot. It doesn’t help that Stefani is one of the more underwritten characters from this franchise. For the first time, our main character isn’t the person who had the death premonition at the top of the screenplay, but is just related to them, so she never even gets to have any establishing character moments of her own as she tries to save people from disaster. Everything happens to her, not because of her, and it would have taken a stronger performer to wring a little more pathos out of a character who seems to have been underwritten on the page from the start. Compare her to Briones, playing her younger brother, and although he isn’t given much more to do than huff teenagerly when his big sis comes home after what feels like a long time away and doesn’t even seem to care that much about catching up, he’s giving a solid performance even when the material is underwhelming.
Overall, though, this one is pretty fun. In my overview of the previous installments, I noted that my friend called Final Destination a franchise where “You get exactly what you expect in a nice way,” and this one is no exception. The things that you want from a Final Destination movie are present: a harrowing opening scene, a bunch of people being snuffed out via Death’s contrived coincidences, an appearance from Tony Todd to explain the rules, a last-minute aversion of death that lulls the remaining survivors into a false sense of security, and a mean ending. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. What this film does, like Final Destination 5, is introduce some new elements to the lore that work in its favor. That all of Death’s victims here are the descendants of previous intended victims who were able to stay out of harm’s way for a time is interesting, and there’s a particularly fun twist with regards to a character who seems utterly screwed but who ends up being fine because they were never actually on Death’s list in the first place. It works.
Brandon texted me a couple of weeks ago to ask if I would be interested in writing about Final Destination: Bloodlines, and I admitted that I hadn’t even planned on seeing it, as I had only seen the first movie years and years ago at a sleepover and hadn’t seen any of them since (although I, like almost everyone on Earth, was familiar with the log-truck opening of the first sequel). This surprised him, as my fondness for Screamand my almost academic interest in the post-Scream teen horror boom is something that has come up often around these parts. Looking back at the franchise, the release years perfectly overlap with the most academically rigorous years of my life, which explains why I never paid much attention to the franchise. I have a very good friend who was very interested in seeing Bloodlines, however, and I did ultimately see it in theaters after several attempts to plan an outing. I’ll be doing a full review of that one, but I didn’t feel fully qualified to do a write-up on it with so little familiarity with the series (despite its largely self-contained nature), since I also didn’t really foresee that I would get the chance to binge all of the others in order to make the most informed review possible. But something else bigger than me had a plan all along … and within six days of seeing Bloodlines, I had seen all five of the previous Final Destination entries. And I have thoughts.
Final Destination (2000)
There’s something legitimately special about this one. I already knew before going into it that this began life as an X-Files spec script, with Alex (Devon Sawa)’s character having initially been planned to be the younger brother of FBI agent Dana Scully. On the show, Scully is specifically noted to have three siblings: sister Melissa and older brother Bill Jr., both of whom appeared in four episodes in the present and a few others in flashbacks, and Melissa is mentioned frequently outside of her actual appearances. Younger brother Charles never appears in the present and, in Jeffrey Reddick’s initial script, occupied the role that would become Alex. The narrative of the film follows Alex as he has a premonition of a terrible air disaster occurring on his class trip to Paris, and his pursuant panic results in him being kicked off of the flight with several other students and a teacher: his nondescript best friend Tod, orphaned sculptor Clear Rivers (Ali Larter), class bully Carter (Kerr Smith) and his girlfriend, goofball Billy (Seann William Scott), and Miss Lewton (Kristen Cloke). As a result of this, he and the others are stated to have “cheated Death’s design,” which means that Death is now coming for all of them, as Alex tries to figure out if there is a way to get off of Death’s list permanently.
I watched this one last during my binge, as my buddy who wanted to watch the movies with me said we should skip to the second as we had both already seen the first, which ended up working out well, since Final Destination 5 is actually a stealth prequel that leads into the the events of this one. It also meant that I had already seen where the franchise was going before returning to the original text, which gave some insight into how this formula would be adapted and recycled. The film franchise that most came to mind as a result was not another horror series but the Mission: Impossible movies. As with those movies, this initial outing is in a genre that the other films aren’t necessarily. The first M:Iis a spy thriller that focuses mostly on spycraft and espionage but which happens to include a couple of major action sequences, notably the Langley heist (where Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt descends into a computer room to steal information) and the big train-set finale that includes a helicopter crashing into a tunnel. The later M:I films are really only spy movies in the broadest sense of the term, and could be more accurately defined as action adventure films that happen to include international intrigue. Every film after the first exists first and foremost as a vehicle to deliver high-octane stunt spectacle, with the “spy” elements only being present to the extent that they are needed to provide a scaffolding on which the action hangs. Likewise, Final Destination is structured as a mystery with the trappings of a horror movie, one that happens to have a singular Rube Goldbergian death in it (Miss Lewton’s), and which is more interested in the question of why these people are marked for death and acting as a somber meditation (as much as a mainstream horror film from the turn of the millennium could be) on survivor’s guilt. It’s not a top-tier Scream-era teen horror, but it’s solidly second rung given the care that went into it. As a franchise, the following Final Destination movies are structurally identical; the lead character has a vision of horrible death, they manage to save others from impending doom, and the survivors then find themselves marked for death and die off in a particular order while they try to figure out a way to avoid dying, all of their deaths being horrific. Like the M:I sequels, the FD sequels take the most memorable element from the first film—Ethan Hunt doing something nearly superhuman in the former and the complicated domino-falling deaths of the survivors in the latter—and then make that gimmick the primary selling point. The stories in the films that follow put more effort into the complexity of the deaths than into the narrative drive or character motivation … and that’s fine, honestly. The “Every movie is essentially the same but come see how complicated the machinery of death is” approach is a perfectly legitimate marketing strategy, since, as a friend of mine put it, “You get exactly what you expect in a nice way.”
The fingerprints of The X-Files are still all over this thing, if you’re familiar enough with the series. First time director James Wong was a producer on the series and wrote seventeen episodes of it (most, if not all, with writing partner Glen Morgan), largely within the first couple of seasons (including “Beyond the Sea,” the episode that first introduced Scully’s family). Coincidentally (or not?), I caught a rerun of the season two episode “Die Hand Die Verletzt” on Comet a couple of weeks ago and there were a lot of elements of it that I saw in Final Destination. That episode focused on teenagers at a high school dealing with a tragedy, a dark force that was claiming them and other members of the community, and a lot of Vancouver forest night shoots that featured lightning almost-but-not-quite killing people. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that this one was one of many episodes co-written by Wong and Morgan. There are also moments scattered throughout the film in which I could detect the influence of characters from the series speaking through the characters in the film, with Daniel Roebuck’s FBI character reciting dialogue that I could hear Scully saying. The overall somberness of the proceedings is really what makes this one both stand out as a film and feel like part of the X-mythos.
Opening Disaster: Despite being the original, this is not the best opening sequence, but it’s still a strong start. I’ve seen parts of this sequence an uncountable number of times, given the number of movies I’ve seen over the years that were released on DVDs that loved pitching the idea of expanding your home media collection based on the presence of special features. I’m fairly certain that every single New Line Cinema release had the same advertisement, that promised “behind the scenes looks” at special effects, playing over clips from this scene. With air disasters being relatively low in the two decades following the film, this one became less scary over time before the recent ongoing spate of crashes and other issues in the past few years make this one frighteningly plausible once again. We’re all watching The Rehearsal, right?
Best Death: It has to be Miss Lewton, although this could be considered the franchise’s “original sin” as far as what the series would devolve into. Special mention has to go to Tammy getting flattened by a bus mid-sentence as well.
Worst Death: Billy Hitchcock is barely a presence in this film, only appearing when a scene needs Carter to bully someone other than Alex for a while. His death is also the most forgettable, as he’s decapitated by a shard of debris after a train smashes Carter’s car.
MVP: Devon Sawa is undoubtedly giving this his all, and I really like him here. He was trying to distance himself from his image as a teen heartthrob at the time by taking on “weirder” roles, as in this and in Idle Hands. Special mention has to be made of Tony Todd, however, as he makes his first appearance here as Bludworth, the mortician who “explains” the rules of Death’s design, such as they are.
Spot the Battle “Star”: In a break from my normal Star Trek obsession, it’s worth mentioning that I noticed an actor from Battlestar Galactica in (practically) every one of these films. Alessandro Juliani appears in an extremely minor role as a street musician in Paris in the film’s epilogue scene. He’s been in tons of stuff, but I know him best as Lt. Felix Gaeta. I met Juliani at a GalaxyCon in 2023 and he was very nice!
Final Destination 2 (2003)
Right off the bat, this film feels cheaper than its predecessor. The opening credits of all of these movies range from good to excellent, with later entries going into full-blown 3D glass breaking and x-ray recreations of the films’ various fatalities. This one opens in the bedroom of Kimberly (A.J. Cook) as the camera pans around in the semi-darkness, occasionally settling on the TV that’s playing an interview with a conspiracy theorist obsessed with the previous film’s Flight 180. This got a theatrical release, but from the first frame, it feels like a sequel in a franchise making its leap from cinemas to the direct-to-video market; it’s all very Lifetime. Luckily, from there, we move fairly quickly to the franchise’s defining scene, Kimberly’s premonition of a massive highway pile-up that occurs as the result of an unsecured load on a log truck. This was the only part of this movie that I had seen prior to this big rewatch, and it has stuck with me forever, as it probably has for an entire generation of moviegoers. Not to spoil too much, but while I thought this movie was pretty mediocre overall, I have to credit Final Destination 2 for a horror sequence that is, in its own way, responsible for altering human behavior to the same extent that Jaws did.
It’s unfortunate that after such a strong opening premonition, what follows is the first instance of using the Final Destination plot mold as straightforwardly and ho-humly as possible. Kimberly’s fellow survivors are a cop (Thomas Burke), a kid and his mom, a workaholic (Keegan Connor Tracy), a recent lottery winner (David Paetkau), a motorcycle-riding high school teacher (T.C. Carson), a pregnant delivery driver (Justina Machado), and a burnout (Rory Peters). The lottery winner dies first, and we’re starting out by jumping into the Goldbergian deaths for everyone, every time now that will henceforth be the defining trait of these films. He throws some old pasta out of a window and then proceeds to experience a series of implausible chain reactions: a magnet falls off of the fridge into his takeout, which then goes into the microwave; he spills oil while preparing a skillet to fry up some frozen snacks; his new Rolex gets caught in the sink, trapping him. We in the audience ask ourselves: Will the oil start a fire? Will the garbage disposal in the sink suddenly click on and mangle him? Will he have to turn on the disposal to get free? It’s not necessarily a bad thing that this will be all that there is to these movies from here on out (see above, re: “You get exactly what you expect in a nice way”), and it’s also good that the first of these survivor offings is one of the better ones. Unfortunately, this once again means that FD2 is front-loaded with the best stuff with a much weaker second half.
My friend that I watched FDs 2-4 with said that this one was his favorite, because there are some impressive deaths here, and that’s what he likes best. In addition to the aforementioned lottery winner (who meets his death when he manages to escape a fiery explosion in his apartment but slips on the spaghetti he threw out earlier and is impaled when the sticky fire escape ladder finally descends all the way), teenager Tim is flattened by a pane of glass that falls from a crane outside of his dentist’s office, his mother is killed due to broken failsafes in an elevator, and the burnout is bisected by a flying barbed wire fence. That’s what you’re probably here for, and you get what you want. Another positive is that Larter reprises her role as Clear Rivers from the first film, and we get two contributions to the (convoluted) lore: she’s managed to stay alive by committing herself to an institution where she finds safety in a padded cell and additional precautions, and we’re also introduced to the concept that Death ties up its loose ends, as each of the survivors in this one should have died sometime in the past year, but for various reasons, Alex’s actions aboard Flight 180 led to their survival. One woman was headed to a bed and breakfast where everyone else died in a gas leak, but she missed her flight because she was on the bus that hit Tammy in the first film; the teacher missed a fatal stabbing that happened to one of his colleagues instead because the school district transferred him to replace Miss Lewton; and so on and so forth.
This is all well and good, but I couldn’t shake the overall sense of cheapness that cast a pall over this one. The set-ups for the Goldbergian deaths is a high water mark for some, but for me, the difference in production quality and overall directorial cleverness between this and the next film was stark, so it ranks a little low for me. In conclusion: strong death sequences, shoddy character and framework.
Opening Disaster: Speaking of high water marks, this is the highest for the entire series. Iconic, socially influential, and twenty years later the marketing for Bloodlines directly invoked people’s decades-long fears that were instilled by the log truck pile-up. Impeccable and unimpeachable.
Best Death: Although Tim’s death is one of the more memorable (since the film had the guts, no pun intended, to kill off a child), the unexpected postscript death by barbecue explosion of a farm kid who happened to be saved by one of the survivors in an earlier scene may be the best part of the film other than the opening sequence. The workaholic’s death via being impaled not during a car crash but after when the airbag is deployed due to first responders’ use of the jaws of life is a neat little subversion as well.
Worst Death: Eugene and Clear’s hospital fireball is pretty goofy, and an ignominious end for Clear after her survival of the first film.
MVP: Despite minimal screen time, it’s definitely Tony Todd.
Spot the Battle “Star”: This time we’ve got a two-fer. I adore Keegan Connor Tracy; she’s been in a million things that I enjoy, with one-off and recurring characters on virtually every show shot in Vancouver: the Blue Fairy in Once Upon a Time, Professor Lipson in The Magicians, Norman’s first onscreen victim in Bates Motel, not to mention appearances on Supernatural, SG-1, First Wave, the list goes on. I even have a particular affection for her “sleep stories” in the Calm app. She plays a major role in this one as one of the survivors, and I almost completely forgot that she was in nine episodes of Battlestar. This film also features an appearance from Aaron Douglas as a frazzled deputy who rushes the pregnant survivor to the hospital; he was the Galactica’s deck chief, Tyrol.
Final Destination 3 (2006)
From the very first moments of FD3, I was immediately more impressed with this one than with its direct predecessor. The credits are well rendered, playing out over images of carnival rides and activities, and the text graphics pattern matches it; it’s a minor thing, but really sets the tone for what followed. Wendy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is at a senior night at the local amusement park with her boyfriend, best friend, and the best friend’s boyfriend Kevin (Ryan Merriman) when she foresees the derailment of the park’s roller coaster and the deaths of everyone aboard. She demands to be let off of the ride, and the operators release all of the seats in her section and they deboard: goth shithead Ian McKinley (Kris Lemche), his girlfriend Erin (Alexz Johnson), football jock Lewis (Texas Battle), a couple of people whose identities are hidden and form part of the mystery, plus two airheaded stereotypes and the creep who won’t stop trying to film them. The accident happens as Wendy foresaw, and Death comes for the survivors one by one, because that’s the Final Destination formula.
The extent to which this means that these films run together also means that when you talk to other people about these movies, the questions that they ask show you what parts of them had memorable staying power. Final Destination 3? Is that the one with the log truck? (No, that’s 2.) Is that the one with the bridge collapse? (No, that’s 5.) Is that the one with the racecars? (No, that’s 4.) Is that the one with the mall? (No, that’s 4 again.) Sorry, folks; the questions we were looking for were “Is that the one with the roller coaster?” and “Is that the one with the tanning beds?” The two airheads, Ashley and Ashlyn, could slot right into any openings in Daria’s younger sister Quinn’s Fashion Club with ease, and their deaths by being cooked alive while trying to bronze up are two of the more memorable kills that Death racks up. Just as importantly, there’s a match cut between their two tanning beds to their side-by-side caskets at the funeral that shows that there’s a bit more thought being put into the direction and editing of this one. It’s not just about following a trail of little contributions that create a big problem, but has some real interest in creating something visually interesting and well-composed outside of simply watching how Death tips the dominoes. That’s the James Wong touch, as he’s back to direct this installment.
That said, the rest of the fatalities in this one are nothing too special, until the climax at the town’s tricentennial. The sequence in the hardware store runs a little too long, and closing with the death-by-nailgun of Erin borders on trite. Similarly, Lewis’s fatal workout is also nothing to write home about. By the time the fireworks start going off and spooking horses into galloping through crowds of people while dragging a rope with a heavy stake at the end, you’ll be grateful that someone decided to put their foot on the gas a little. It’s also worth noting that although the metaphorical scaffolding of this one is stronger than FD2’s, the script itself is a little undercooked. A great deal of hay is made about Wendy’s supposed need to be in control, but this never really amounts to anything more than telling us that this is her Primary Character Trait, and it never really gets around to showing it. I did like the new twist that all of Wendy’s (terrible) photographs taken the night of the roller coaster incident provided clues about how the survivors would be picked off one by one, and it’s good that the film can find some new wrinkle to add despite being, skeletally, exactly the same as the movies that came before it. I also appreciated that the film included a human antagonist, as it did with Carter in the first one, as it gives the characters something more tangible and real to fight against than just a spooky wind. This one is in the top half of my rankings, if for no other reason than that it’s trying harder than FD2, and mostly succeeding.
Opening Disaster: A pretty solid opener, all things considered. There’s a bit more work put into introducing the characters and their various motivations, and the fact that Wendy’s best friend was planning on dumping Kevin, a secret that only Wendy knows (and plans to take to her grave) lends the whole thing a bittersweet quality. Where the log truck sequence succeeds is in making something completely mundane feel like it has the potential for massive death. On planes and rollercoasters, people already feel a certain (and usually normal) amount of uncertainty and anxiety, so it’s less surprising when something goes awry. The maulings are pretty brutal, though, if that’s what you’re into.
Best Death: There’s a reason that people still talk about the tanning beds.
Worst Death: It’s Ian getting smashed by a cherry picker, easily.
MVP: I really wish it was Mary Elizabeth Winstead/Wendy here, but that underbaked element to her “control freak” characterization leaves her feeling less fleshed out than she could have been. I think I’m actually going to have to give it to sleazeball Frankie Cheeks. He captures the 2006 vibe more than anything else, and his pervy nature makes his death decently satisfying. A little bit of air gets let out of the balloon when he’s no longer part of the story.
Spot the Battle “Star”: Patrick Gallagher is one of those “Hey it’s that guy” actors, having guested in a million things. He’s here as the carnival employee who escorts the survivors off of the ride, and he had a memorable appearance as a terrorist in the first season BSG episode “Colonial Day.” Weirdly, I know him best from his appearance in the Rapture flick Revelation.
The Final Destination, aka Final Destination 4 (2009)
People say that this is the worst one, and they’re right. The Final Destination was shot to make the most out of the (at the time) most recent attempt to foist the gimmick of 3D movies on the public, and as such there’s a lot of stuff flying at you. Final Destination is, admittedly, the perfect franchise to translate to the “Here comes something fast!!” experience, but the models used are just bafflingly awful. The main character’s visions appear as giant, poorly-rendered low-res images of scissors, tow chains, and a truly laughable snake that wraps around a pole before morphing into a caduceus. It’s a universally agreed upon low point, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it features the return of FD2’s creative team of David R. Ellis as director and Eric Bress as writer. In between that film and this one, Bress wrote The Butterfly Effect and Ellis directed Snakes on a Plane; this information is presented without comment. Even the things that worked about that one are absent here, and the film’s very short 82 minute runtime speaks to just how little inspiration there existed to fill out the scaffolding of this premise. It’s barely a movie.
At a race track, Nick (Bobby Campo) foresees a blowout on the track that results in an escalating accident that will take the life of a huge number of the attendees. He creates enough of a ruckus that his girlfriend Lori (Shantel VanSanten), her friend Janet (Haley Webb), and his bro-y bud Hunt (Nick Zano) are escorted out by security guard George (Mykelti Wiliamson). George also ejects a racist asshole, and the commotion also ends up saving the life of a mother of two young brats, who was trampled to death in the original vision. The racetrack disaster then unfolds, and, you know the drill by now, Death is tracking down each of the survivors one by one in the order that they would have died before. By this point, the scene in which the person with the vision presents their research/theories to the others is old hat, and the recap itself just keeps getting longer since each previous film’s disaster is added to the list of historical instances each time. The random deductions that characters make to reason out Death’s plan are always like the non sequitur trains of thought that would pop up in the old Adam West Batman, but it’s particularly tedious this time around. It also doesn’t help that this is the least developed or interesting group of characters, with even the shallow characterizations of the folks back in FD2 feeling like people with rich backstory in comparison. Presumably to suit the 3D conversion, everything has flat, boring, TV style lighting that calls back to the cheap-feeling nature of Ellis and Bress’s previous collaboration.
My friend who loved FD2 hated this one. At about halfway into the movie, he stood up to leave the group screening, since he was bored, but decided to sit back down to try and see at least “one good death scene” (this was after the racist was burned alive and dragged behind his own tow truck while trying to light a cross on George’s lawn, which would turn out to be the best that the film had to offer). He ended up staying all the way through the end—a man getting sliced into pieces by a chain-link fence (what we around here refer to as getting Cube-d), another man getting his guts sucked out through his rectum by an overpowered pool filter, and a man getting hit by an ambulance—not a one of them was good enough to satisfy the particular craving for creative gore that the film-going public has come to expect from a series that’s branded itself so strongly at this point. Part of what makes these so effective is when people can see tragedy befall the characters in a convoluted but not impossible way and recognize the potential for things to go horribly wrong in their own life. The most tragic things that occur at the racetrack are the things that could happen in any public setting when something awful is going down and people stampede or otherwise panic, and in that way it has an admitted kind of universal applicability. But I don’t see a man getting his asshole stuck on a pool filter or watch another man get shot into a fence by a gas canister so hard that he gets smooshed through it like he was secretly made of cake and think “That could happen to me.” Really and truly not worth the time.
Opening Disaster: It’s fine.
Best Death: The most cathartic death is watching the racist asshole get dragged/burned to death while “Why Can’t We Be Friends?” plays over his radio. But the best death is probably the one that Lori has in the second premonition, in which she gets mauled to death by an elevator that has been busted by architectural damage. It’s marred by the fact that she starts coughing up blood when she’s only in the gears up to her shins, but it’s still the only thing that happened in this movie that reflects any real life anxieties that I have.
MVP: I really only enjoyed two sequences in this, which were the scenes in which Janet almost drowns in a car wash and the part of the film in which George attempts to kill himself over and over again to get on with it, but his attempts keep failing since he’s not the next person on the list. Although his backstory basically blends that of Eugene (who tried and failed to kill himself to choose his death rather than let Death choose him) and Mrs. Carpenter (who was resigned to death and looked forward to meeting her spouse and child on the other side) from FD2, it doesn’t feel like a retreading of the same ground. That’s owed all to Wiliamson’s performance; he’s the best thing here.
Spot the Battle “Star”: There is no overlap between Battlestar and this, the worst Final Destination film. Take from that what you will, although it’s probably simply because this was the only one shot in New Orleans instead of Vancouver. There is still a connection, however, as actress Shantel VanSanten had a major role as Karen on For All Mankind, Battlestar creator Ronald D. Moore’s current series.
Final Destination 5 (2011)
So, Final Destination 5 is actually … great? Although this one doesn’t lean as hard into comedy as Bloodlines would after it, it’s still the first time that this one went for as many jokes as it does scares. I also found the characters in this one to be some of the most likable; I really appreciated that several of the characters were making ends meet by working multiple jobs, just like I was around the same time. Sam (Nicholas D’Agosto) spends his days as a salesman alongside with his buddy Peter (Miles Fisher) at Presage Paper, and at nights he works for the local branch of Le Cáfe Miro 81, where he’s impressed the head chef so much that he’s been nominated to apprentice at the flagship location in Paris. This complicates his relationship with Molly (Emma Bell), who also works at Presage, as does Peter’s girlfriend Candice (Ellen Wroe), a competitive gymnast. Candice’s work enemy is Olivia (Jacqueline MacInnes Wood), the extremely nearsighted office hottie, although office IT guy Isaac (P.J. Byrne) is indiscriminate with his pervy flirtation with every woman in the office (and outside of it). All of them are being taken on a company retreat by bus by their boss, Lapman (David Koechner), and when the bus stops on a bridge that’s under construction, Sam has a vision of it collapsing, managing to prevent the deaths of the named characters above as well as new factory foreman Nathan (Arlen Escarpeta). You know the drill by now; this means that they’re all on Death’s list … except for Molly, who survived even in the original vision.
It was a pretty widely revealed spoiler at the time that this film was a stealth prequel to the original Final Destination, and it’s hard for me to imagine that this wasn’t obvious to anyone paying attention, even without that knowledge. There’s a noticeable backward technological step in all of the cell phones that people use, and there are some visible dates (like on the massage coupon that Isaac steals out of a dead co-worker’s desk, leading him to the very parlor in which he would meet his fare) that show that this is pre-2001. As in the original Final Destination, the main character is initially interrogated by federal agents under suspicion of committing an act of extremism, and they are pursued by a member of the FBI (Courtney B. Vance here), but the use of “extremist” instead of “terrorist” feels very 90s. And as soon as you realize that the job opportunity that Sam has means that he would be working at the same Paris cafe where Carter died in the epilogue of the first film, you get the inkling that he’s never going to make it to France. None of these movies has a happy ending (except perhaps 2), as the great cosmic joke of the series is that Death can never be cheated, and no matter what steps the characters take, they’re going to die just before the credits roll when they finally think that they’re safe. Despite this happening every single time, it’s always a little bit of a shock, and the way this one winds around and dovetails with the franchise’s beginning is nicely done. I watched 2–5 in order, then looped back around to the first, and the effect was seamless.
Tony Todd has his largest presence in any of these films in this one, where Bludworth reappears after a two film absence, once again a creepy figure at the scenes of the deaths of the bridge collapse survivors. Sam thinks he’s involved, but it’s revealed that he’s only the coroner (which isn’t exactly the same as a mortician, as Alex and Clear broke into a funeral home in the first one, not a morgue, but I’m quibbling), although he does clue them in on the whole “Death’s design” thing. There’s a fresh new wrinkle in this one for the first time in a while, as Bludworth mentions a theory that one could “steal” another person’s time by killing them directly, as kind of a sacrifice. When Nathan spots an accident about to happen while arguing with antagonistic union rep Roy, he tries to get both of them out of the way of a falling piece of industrial equipment, but Roy grapples with him instead and, when Nathan breaks free by pushing Roy away, Roy ends up impaled on a giant hook. When this does seem to cause Nathan’s death on the list to be skipped, Peter, already grieving the loss of Candice (who was the first survivor to die), goes a little off the deep end. Final Destination 5 doesn’t deviate too far from the formula, but it finally does something different and fresh, introducing a bit of a slasher element. Although he’s found a way to profit off of his resemblance to Tom Cruise, Fisher’s hairstyling and wardrobe as Peter give him a distinctively Patrick Bateman-esque aura, and it’s a lot of fun to watch him deteriorate into a willingness to kill to save himself.
Fundamentally, I think that I may simply be out of alignment with the audience that these are made for, with the biggest example of this being that I think these movies are at their best when there are other antagonists beyond simple, amorphous Death. If you’re into watching those dominoes fall, then you get what you want every time, and that’s what these movies exist for, so I’m the odd man out here. I’m much more invested when there’s something tangible for the heroes to grapple with, even if I know that they’re ultimately doomed and we’re all just killing time (no pun intended) before Death crashes a plain, train, or other automobile in (or around) which all of the so-happy-to-be-alive survivors will meet their inevitable gory deaths. Making one of the main characters devolve from friend to attempted murderer that the leads have to fight directly adds a level of complication, if not complexity, to the proceedings. This is the one I’m looking forward to watching again.
Opening Disaster: Ranks second behind the log truck pile-up in FD2. There may be a bit of geographical bias going on here as, being from Louisiana, I’ve spent a lot of my life driving over many, many somewhat scary bridges. The Mississippi River bridge between East and West Baton Rouge Parishes, the Morganza Spillway bridge, the Atchafalaya Spillway bridge, the Sunshine Bridge, and especially the structurally deficient Calcasieu River Bridge; I’ve travelled them all, countless times. And yet in all my anxious bridge crossings, I never considered that there were so many harrowing ways to die in a bridge collapse. Lapman is doused in hot road tar, Candice falls and is eviscerated by the mast of a sailboat passing below, Peter gets impaled by falling rebar, and Olivia manages to survive the fall into the water only to be crushed by a car. Horrifying.
Best Death: To reveal the cause and circumstances of Nathan’s death would give away too much after I’ve already said enough, but it’s classic stuff. Candice’s death in a gymnastics accident is certainly one of the more gruesome, and watching her do flips and spins on the bar while juuuust barely avoiding stepping on the screw that’s waiting to set off the chain of events is one of the most effectively tense set-ups. I have to give it to Isaac, though, as he really makes you groan with disgust at his whole deal before he bites it, comically.
Worst Death: Like FD4, this one was shot for 3D, but it’s much less obtrusive than in its predecessor. The credits feature lots of glass breaking at the audience, but I didn’t think much of it. When I read that this was the case, I could remember certain shots that, with that knowledge, were clearly throwing things at the camera, but I hadn’t given them a second thought. The only one that feels really out of place is Lapman getting beamed in the head by a heavy duty wrench that was shot out by machinery. It’s the least interesting by far.
MVP: I never really understood why Nick D’Agosto’s career wasn’t more successful. I remember first seeing him as West in the second season of Heroes, where he played Hayden Panettiere’s love interest that year before disappearing after the 2007 writer’s strike resulted in an abbreviated season. He got some exposure on The Office, where he played Jan’s handsome young assistant who spurred Michael’s jealousy, and then he was in that movie Fired Up, where he and Eric Christian Olsen con their way into attending cheerleading camp so that they can hook up. It was a flop, but somewhere in a box in my closet I still have a mini football from the movie’s marketing campaign, since we used to get a lot of that kind of stuff at KLSU, so it’s never all that far from my mind. I find him very charming here, and he has the precise amount of boy-next-door charisma to pull this role off.
Spot the Battle “Star”: The head chef at the restaurant where Isaac works is played by Mike Dopud, who played Specialist Gage (a crewman from the Battlestar Pegasus who later joined in the Season 4 mutiny) on Battlestar Galactica, and appeared again in the prequel webseries Blood & Chrome.
Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)
A full review of this one is coming soon! Some initial thoughts on Bloodlines is that it’s a strong entry overall. It’s got a great opening sequence, manages to subvert expectations in several places, and goes full tilt into being more comedic, which made it feel very fresh.
Opening Disaster: One of the best. This one tapped into my primal fear of heights and pumped me for every ounce of adrenaline I had in my body. The rooftop restaurant that collapsed filled me with abject terror; I was sick for the entire first fifteen minutes.
Best Death: After such a long absence, it’s great that the film goes for broke with one of its earliest death sequences, for Uncle Howard. The dominoes in this one feel perfectly calibrated for maximum physical repulsion and suspense. It would have only been topped by one that followed, except that one was actually a fake-out, so I can’t count it officially.
Worst Death: Darlene kicking it mid-sentence when a light pole falls on her was a bit of a let down.
MVP: Tony Todd is the obvious choice once again, especially as the younger actors in this one are probably offering some of the least interesting performances. I think I have to give it up for Richard Harmons’s Erik Campbell here, however, as he has the most dynamic performance, delivers some pretty great lines (and, according to press releases, had a lot of great alternates for some of the ad libs that made it to the final print), and is overall one of the more endearing characters to come out of the series, even if he’s too obnoxious to get along with in real life. He’s the goth guy from FD3 done correctly.
Spot the Battle “Star”: I immediately recognized Vancouverian actor Richard Harmon, who plays major character Erik in this one, from his appearances in many of the shows shot there. He has a notable face, and the first time I saw him in something was in his appearance on Fringe, in the very important episode “White Tulip.” The next time I remember seeing him on screen was in two episodes of the Battlestar spinoff Caprica, and was going to use that as a slight cheat since he was never technically on BSG. But I also recognized Gabrielle Rose for her many TV movie and genre television appearances, having otherwise completely forgotten that she was in the BSG episode “The Woman King” until I was perusing her IMDb profile, so we’re in the clear! To be fair, “The Woman King” is a pretty forgettable episode.
Final (heh) ranking, from worst to best:
6.The Final Destination (aka 4): Absolute bottom of the barrel. Bad kills, unlikable or incomplete characters, hard to believe that this was released as a finished film.
5. Final Destination 2: Shoddy narrative framework, nothing to speak of in terms of cinematography, paper-thin character work, but good death sequences. Best opening sequence, though.
4./3. Final Destination 3 and Final Destination: Bloodlines (tie): Both very solid entries that have an equal balance of scares, character work, and narrative throughline.
2. Final Destination: The first and one of the best; strong work from X-Files alums.
1. Final Destination 5: Strongest overall, most consistent; brings something fresh to the table by introducing the slasher/human antagonist angle.
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