From the looks of it, the Final Destination series is far from reaching its own final destination (which is probably somewhere around the straight-to- video bin). The third installment in the increasingly repetitive series finds original director Wong and his co-writer, Glen Morgan, returning after sitting out Final Destination 2, but all that means is that they more slavishly recreate the formula of their original than the makers of the second film did.
That formula is this: A nervous but pretty teen (in this case high-school senior Wendy, played by Winstead) has a premonition of disaster (here it's a roller-coaster derailment) and saves a diverse group of peers, who are then picked off one by one in ridiculously gruesome accidents to make up for the deaths they avoided in the initial disaster.
The law of diminishing returns is in full effect here, even more so because, unlike many horror franchises, Final Destination doesn't have a recognizable villain to trot out in each film. The antagonist is death itself, but it's embodied as an invisible force, not a guy in a black robe. None of the characters from the first two movies show up in FD3, although there are enough references to past events to create a sort of loose connection. What results is little more than a re-enactment of the earlier films with a few minor tweaks that don't add anything.
Wong and Morgan wrote some classic episodes of The X-Files, and they brought some of that sensibility to the original Final Destination, which was suspenseful and entertaining and even had something to say about survivor's guilt buried under all the gore. Its sequel was campier and more violent, but also perversely entertaining, and opened with a bravura sequence depicting its disaster (a multicar pileup) that FD3 can't even come close to matching.
The cast of no-names is forgettable, and the convoluted accidents (which resemble deadly versions of the board game Mousetrap) are little more than elaborate teases that annoyingly capitalize on the audience's familiarity with the series' conventions. FD3 retains a spark of the cleverness that has distinguished the franchise from other horror cheapies, but mostly it's just coasting.