There are two reactions to a movie about people dying in creatively elaborate ways. The first is the horror movie buff's reaction and usually goes something like this: "Sweet." The second is the horror movie hater and goes like this: "This is what is wrong with our society, blah, blah, blah."
"Final Destination 3," along with its two predecessors, is made to create elaborately gruesome deaths and you will either love it or hate it.
The idea behind the films is that a teenager has a vision of his or her and a few other people's imminent death. Because of this vision, these lives are saved. However, it appears death holds a grudge and will kill off each one of the people who were supposed to die — in horrible ways. Death seems to get very angry when you don't die how you are supposed to.
In "Final Destination 3," Wendy Christensen has the vision of a bloody roller coaster crash. She freaks out and saves six people's lives including her friend's boyfriend Kevin Fischer. Unfortunately death's plans can not be upset, so the killing starts. Wendy and Kevin run around trying to save the others as death kills them in order of how they would of died on the roller coaster. The rule seems to be if someone intervenes then death skips that person and goes on to the next one, though in the end that rule isn't followed very closely.
This iteration includes two half-naked young women getting fried alive in a tanning booth, a nail gun firing repeatedly into a girl's head and multiple beheadings.
What the Final Destination films do differently from other horror films is the set-up for the kills. Instead of death being a scary creature or psychopath, it is merely a force. All the deaths can be explained as freak accidents, the culmination of many separate events conspiring to kill these poor, poor teens.
In that way "Final Destination 3" is quite creative. The enjoyable part is not watching the teens run around and get slaughtered but figuring out how the teens' surroundings are going to randomly kill them in the most bloody and random way.
Luckily in this film you want everyone to die. The characters are all disgusting stereotypes whom, for the most part, deserve what they get. Even the two leads are hard to care about, Wendy being whiny and annoying and Kevin having as much depth as a puddle. This isn't that much of a problem though since the point of the movie is to watch them die.
That is what "Final Destination 3" understands. The reason gory, bloody, pointless slasher flicks do well is not in the living but in the dying. It seems terrible to congratulate someone for coming up with creative ways of killing people but that's what we tune in for; "Final Destination 3" gives blood to us in gallons.