Final Destination 3

After a premonition spares her and a few others from the roller-coaster mishap that kills her classmates, a slightly officious young lady (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) discerns death’s scheme for catching up with the survivors. She tries to warn them, bless her heart, but things get, um, messy. Having somehow neglected the first and second Final Destination, neither of which apparently maintained its finality, I appreciate this movie’s efforts to make me feel like I haven’t missed much. It takes great pains—and gives them, gruesomely—to explain itself. But to call it procedural isn’t necessarily to complain; director James Wong enjoys organizing dangerous objects and circumstances into precariously menacing Rube Goldberg arrangements, which, when topped off with a dash of adolescent hubris, crumple into gleeful carnage. Please forgive me for having found some melancholic satisfaction in it.