When Hollywood finds a really good killer, you can bet that character will return more than once to haunt the Cineplex. When James Wong and Glen Morgan stumbled across Jeffrey Reddick's original Final Destination screenplay, they found a really good killer. After all, nobody beats Death.

Rather than make Death a figure, the directing/writing team made him a presence. At times they preferred to make him more of a suggestion, yet paradoxically made his effects as explicit as they could.

It's quite clever, really, because no actor needs to return from movie to movie. Death outwits them all. Final Destination 2, nominally turned over to Reddick, tried to tie things in directly with a survivor from the first, but Final Destination 3 dispenses with that. Besides Death, the only thing that returns is the style. Okay, and in a voice cameo, actor Tony Todd. But that's it.

Morgan and Wong even up the ante a bit by providing the characters with clues to the red herring threats that they played so well in the first film. Guessing just how exactly Death will reap his revenge provides most of the fun. The ultimate splatter seems almost beside the point.

Upping that ante, however, stretches credibility instead of really heightens the suspense. Survivor Wendy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) spends a lot of time looking at photos to see just what random elements might add up to fatality. Could it be the charm bracelet? The black fingernails? The devil with his hand up her boyfriend's behind? The lead pipe in the Conservatory?

It gets a little ridiculous for a movie that should just quietly ignore its ridiculousness.

The set-up, however, is a killer. At a Senior party at a local amusement park, Wendy wanders about taking digital photos for the yearbook. Wherever the park is, it straddles the line between cheesy carnival and big-budget rides.

As the movie introduces the key characters, Wong bounces lightly along, never lingering too long on any one element. It feels as fun and slightly disorienting as a night at an amusement park would be, while everybody still manages to register with the audience. In just a few lines, the third-person referring Frankie Cheeks (Sam Easton) makes himself known. It's economical and ominous, as everything builds toward Wendy's premonition.

When the teens climb aboard the "Devil's Flight" (definitely one of the best fictional roller coasters in the movies - if not for its falling apart), Wendy sees slaughter coming on the tracks. It plays out in full, in a sequence that works beautifully. Even though it's only a vision, it sets a tone that the rest of the movie fails to follow, because every death in it is perfectly believable.

So seven teens cheat death, and survivor Kevin (Ryan Merriman) finds a website that talks about Flight 180 from the first film (the second is clearly being ignored). Wendy notices that her photograph of her late boyfriend makes it look like the roller coaster is going through his head. Upon further research, it turns out that there was a crack in the lens that took Abraham Lincoln's last photograph, a crack that runs right where he was shot in the head. And (I wish I was making this up) there's a photo of the World Trade Center with the shadow of an airplane on it. It's a stretch, and a teeny bit tasteless.

Then again, this movie features burning and popping corpses, several manglings and body splittings and at four gratuitous breast shots, so taste is probably not what you're seeking here.

Everyone plays it with earnestness, and that helps save things. The teens talk and act like real teens. Some are shallow and some think they're deeper than they are. Morgan and Wong really have an ear for teen dialogue.

Shirley Walker, she who composed the themes for much of the animated DC Universe, provides a great score, and though Death never actually appears, he sings a really creepy song a lot. Or it could just be a real pop song from the early seventies, when most pop music was less entertaining and more just plain creepy.

Death still has a penchant for playing the board game Mousetrap, and even if the payoffs may seem unbelievable, the set-ups remain beautifully tense. It just seems to lose urgency from time to time.

Questions remain, which may carry over to a Final Destination 4. Why are certain people having these vivid psychic flashes? Could Death be playing a game with Life? Morgan and Wong, you can take that idea for free, because I'll have fun seeing what you do with it.

Rating:

Derek McCaw