“Final Destination” made us scared of airplanes and moving vehicles. “Final Destination 2” made us scared of highways, dentists and elevators. “Final Destination 3” made us scared of roller coasters and sunbeds. “The Final Destination” made us scared of race tracks and escalators. And now “Final Destination 5” will make us scared of bridges, acupuncture and laser eye surgery.
We all know the drill, people. There’s a person, our protagonist (in this case Sam Lawton, played by Nicholas D‘Agosto, “Fired Up!”), who has a premonition that he and his friends are going to die in a freak accident (in this case, a bridge collapse). We watch incredibly violent images; people get sliced, diced, skewered and impaled. Our protagonist wakes up from the vision, freaks out, freaks others out and manages to get some of his pals away from the scene of the predicted accident. And just like magic, they watch as the accident predicted by our protagonist occurs just like he said.
There’s suspicion cast against the protagonist. How did he know the accident was going to happen? Is he psychic or did he himself cause the accident? They’re stumped. He’s stumped. We’re not stumped. We’ve seen this four times before. And we know what’s soon going to happen to theses clash of personalities now that they’ve cheated death.
Yes, Death begins to hunt these poor buggers down, one by one, to fix his/its list. The survivors begin dying in sometimes intricate, sometimes not so intricate, “accidents.” They’re stumped again. We’re not. Luckily for them, a very creepy Tony Todd explains the situation to them: Death’s stalking them, and he’s not taking any hostages.
As such, the film calls for a large assortment of death scenes, through which writer Eric Heisserer (“A Nightmare on Elm Street”) must mastermind elaborate ways in which characters unfortunately meet their makers. Gruesomely dark humour runs rampant as these panic-stricken grave-hoppers are butchered and mutilated time and time again, reduced to nothing more than splashes of blood and splatters of brain matter.
It’s fun to try and figure out how death scenes will play out as you watch the pieces fall into place. You see a malfunctioning air conditioner, you mentally note that. You see a spark from an electrical wire, you note that. You see a collection of lit candles, you note them. A loose screw? Leaking water? A broken chair leg? Yep, note all those. It’s very amusing to attempt to fit these pieces together and discover for yourself how the individual will be bumped off, and the end result is never what you expect.
The franchise lives for these death scenes; they’re the most memorable aspect of the movies and are what keep fans coming back to the cinema to watch them. Characterisation is practically superfluous; the point is for us to morbidly chortle at the inventiveness and ghastliness of these characters’ grisly deaths. But “Final Destination 5” does manage to have some characterisation to its characters, assisted by a decent cast (David Koechner and P.J. Byrne in particular) that succeeds in projecting some genuine personality.
As a stand-alone film, “Final Destination 5” wouldn’t quite work; the ingenious 11-year-old premise is handled with limited impact. So, it’s lucky that four films precede it that have fully outlined this premise; you go in knowing exactly what kind of shit is gonna go down for the protagonists, and it’s a joy to watch the story develop in the same way it always has since the franchise’s groundbreaking debut all those years ago.
For comparison, I’d say part five of this smash-hit horror saga is on about the same level as part three, i.e. good, not great, and a tad forgettable. The death scenes are very creative, nail-bitingly tense and darkly humorous, and… well, is there anything else you need to know? Oh, and the 3-D is remarkable and used very effectively, succeeding in not being the irritating distraction it usually is.
7/10
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