In this movie Devon Sawa plays a high school student Alex getting on a plane bound for France as part of a class trip. He has a premonition that the plane is going to crash and makes a huge scene that ends with him, a teacher and several other students being ejected from the plane. Sure enough the plane explodes shortly after takeoff, killing everyone aboard.
The premonition is one of the movies best scenes. It shows the plane tearing apart from the inside with students being sucked out the hole in the side and flames roasting passengers. This scene will do a good job of giving most viewers a pretty good scare. The scenes that immiediately follow it are well thought out. Those who were thrown off the plane are questioned by the FBI who understandably want to know why they got off and why one of them knew the plane would explode before hand.
The FBI, students, teachers and parents now view Alex as a freak. Despite having saved the lives of several people they are scared of him. It's about this point that movie becomes rather uneven. One of the survivors dies in an apparent suicide. Alex has another premonition of sorts but too late to save his friend. For some reason this leads him and another survivor, Clear (who names a girl Clear?), to break into a funeral home to look at the body. Why? Why not wait until day when there will be a wake for just such a thing? Well if they waited they wouldn't have a chance to meet the mortician. Not only is he not upset or surprised that they broke in, he lays the whole plot out for them. Heaven forbid they have to figure it out for themselves.
Now that Alex knows that death has a plan he can map out just what order the remaining survivors will die. What follows is a serious of rather creative deaths. Unfortunately since the plot was carefully laid out for us by the mortician, there isn't much tension involved. It mostly becomes a guessing game. There is some entertainment value in trying to guess how everyone will die but little to no emotional weight attached. One of the deaths stands out because it is so sudden you don't have time to think about it. Clearly the director was watching last summer's Deep Blue Sea for inspiration.
Toward the end it degenerates into the teen's attempts to sort out the convoluted logic involved in death's plan. I don't know why since all they had to do was listen for John Denver (Denver died in a plane crash, get it?) music to know that someone was about to buy the farm.
It's not a bad movie. It just misses being a rather good one. If the script hadn't taken a short cut and forced the characters to learn for themselve it might have developed the tension it so desperately needed. Then I might have found it to be somewhat scary. As it is I couldn't find a reason to care about the characters to feel the weight of their impending doom. The people here are just cookie cutter characters doing what the script says to. You never feel that they are thinking for themselves. One character is really angry with Alex all the time. Why? Because he's supposed to be angry. There's no reason for it, he's just angry.
I left the theater wishing that it had been a more tightly written movie. It could have easily been a blast to watch but ends up just missing.
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