By Dan Dunn
Special to the Daily Press

The movie: Final Destination
The director: James Wong
The stars: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Ryan Merriman

The conceit upon which the “Final Destination” franchise is built is a clever and bankable one: Death gets cheated, death gets angry, death gets payback in spectacular fashion. In “FD1,” seven people are spared fiery deaths in a plane crash thanks to a premonition by a clairvoyant teen; then get picked off later, one by one and in increasingly gruesome ways by a debt-collecting grim reaper. Seven grave dodgers managed to avoid a fatal multi-car pileup in the first sequel, and this time around the lucky/unlucky seven deke a deadly runaway rollercoaster only to learn the hard way about the downside of tanning beds and part-time jobs at hardware stores. So we know going in that most, if not all, of the traumatized survivors — a cast of unknowns led by Mary Elizabeth Winstead — are going to die. It’s just a question of how. The violence is as gratuitous as it gets, yet there’s something perversely appealing in the run-up to the inevitable demise of each stereotype — it’s fun to try and guess how the Jock, the Loner and the Mean Girl are going to get offed. Death, the only “character” to appear in all three films, is still pretty scary, too.