David Farnor | On 20, May 2025

Director: James Wong
Cast: Devon Sawa, Ali Larter, Tony Todd, Chad Donella, Kerr Smith
Certificate: 15

What if you could see Death coming? And what if, after you escaped Death’s clutches, Death came back for you to get revenge? It’s a killer concept for a film, and that premise makes 2000’s Final Destination more than worth revisiting.

The set-up is nothing less than inspired: Alex (Devon Sawa) is boarding a flight to Paris from JFK Airport on a school trip. But while waiting for Flight 180 to take off, he has a premonition that a mechanical fault will lead to the plane exploding mid-air. A swift, panic-induced exit from the flight later, he’s removed from the plane and ends up grounded with his classmates Carter, Carter’s girlfriend, Terry, Alex’s best friend, Tod, Billy, Clear and bemused teacher Valerie. Sure enough, the plane explodes – and FBI agents rapidly descend to work out how Alex knew what was coming.

The explanation is as implausible as it is unsettling – particularly because, within days of a memorial service for the flight’s victims, the other survivors start to die in increasingly freak accidents.

The script, written by James Wong, Glen Morgan and Jeffrey Reddick, began as an X-Files episode, before being fleshed out into a feature film. It makes all the right decisions straight out of the gate, not least making sure that Death remains unseen throughout – the threat of something invisible and inevitable makes for a totally unique horror franchise, and prevents events from descending into familiar slasher movie territory.

The film is also patient enough to spend time with its teenage cast, with Sawa nicely cast as the awkwardly unpopular guy in the class who is at once a bewildered everyman and a calm calculator of odds. His friendship with Tod (Chad Donella) has a lived-in chemistry, just as his antagonistic interactions with jock bully Carter (Kerr Smith) ring true. Ali Larter, meanwhile, brings charisma aplenty to the enigmatic Clear. There’s a tangible sense of trauma that the film doesn’t shy away from, while a touch of gravitas comes from the late Tony Todd as William Bludworth, a mortician whose familiarity with death makes him an ominous deliverer of exposition.

The lore, at this stage, is still being developed, but director James Wong is smartly understated in the movie’s ambitious, creative set pieces: from the nightmare-inducing plane sequence to collisions with buses, trains and kitchen implements, Wong finds fear in everyday objects without turning things into slapstick. There’s a gut-churning tension in wondering what might turn into a death trap – laced with a neat use of a recurring John Denver song on the soundtrack. The result is a killer concept, chillingly executed. Decades later, it holds up as a distinctive franchise-starter and a gem in its own right.

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