Final Destination 5 (2011)

Every picture for this movie looks exactly the same.

What’s so frustrating about most horror franchises is that they often begin with a reasonably clever idea and then become a formulaic scare machine that cranks out the same product every year or so. The public consumes it, and so they will continue to be fed the same thing for years until they finally decide to reject it. This is true of all mainstream film genres, but there always seems to be more fourquels, fivequels, sixquels and so on when dealing with horror. In many ways, the Final Destination series is the most systematic of any horror series ever made. There is no masked, deformed villain. There is only Death, and the gruesome ways in which various attractive twentysomethings encounter it. If any series could best be described as a mindless gore delivery system, this is it. Final Destination 5, the latest of the series, is hardly a world-changer, but in many ways it is a more intriguing and intermittently exciting installment than many might expect. It still isn’t good, but as a wise man once said: people who like this sort of thing will find this to be the sort of thing they like.

This film follows a group of young people who work together at a paper company, making theirs the most attractive workplace of all time. After they board a bus en route to a company retreat, Sam (Nicholas D’Agosto), like many before him, has a vision that they’re all going to die violently in a bridge collapse. When a small group of them escape the chaos, Death—ever the curmudgeon—is none too pleased. In the days following the collapse, they all begin to die one-by-one in the strangest way imaginable. So yeah, it’s like every other Final Destination movie. Only now, they can still survive if they kill a civilian in their place. So yada yada, blood, guts and brains, oh my.

It would be a disservice to Final Destination fans to spoil any of the film’s murders, as that is the one and only reason anybody would ever pay actual money to see Final Destination 5. Just know that they are more on the clever side that usual, and director Steven Quale (who has done second-unit and visual effects work on James Cameron films) toys with the audience in some rather interesting ways. At this point, a Final Destination film has no right being even mildly suspenseful—if the characters don’t die, then there’s no movie—but this film has a fair share of red herrings that actually result in some relatively unexpected outcomes. In seemingly every scene, Quale presents the audience with about ten ways any character could die. Then the kill shot often comes from the least expected places. This is a series that plays on the idea that anyone could die at many moment due to bizarre circumstances, and there’s plenty more of that to be found here.

While the death scenes are intermittently effective—they lose steam as the film goes on—Final Destination 5 is predictably lacking in just about every other category. The only “character” to speak of is D’Agosto, who actually has dreams, ambitions and feelings. In any other film he’d be unforgivably underdeveloped, but in a Final Destination film he feels like a revelation. Everyone else merely exists to be a stereotype for about ten minutes of screen time before dying in a brutal accident. This film is never substantially better than “effective,” and so I cannot in good conscience give it a positive grade. I can, however, say that if you genuinely want to see this movie, then you shan’t be disappointed. My lofty expectations of violent mediocrity were met, so huzzah for Final Destination 5.

The only real sequence in Final Destination 5 which is substantially above-average is the finale, which takes the usual epilogue and adds an intriguing twist. It’s not a game-changer, but it sends the film out on a higher note than the series has likely seen in a while. (I haven’t seen them all, and I sleep just fine at night.) Instead of following the formula in the most boring way possible, Final Destination 5 deserves credit for actually attempting to make a movie out of the familiar pieces rather than a half-baked money vacuum. Basically, if you’re looking for a final verdict it is this: I did not particularly like Final Destination 5, but that is because I don’t have much interest in the Final Destination films. However, I am willing to admit when trash is rather well-executed. This isn’t the Fast Five of Final Destination films, but the fact that I’m not angry at its existence is a step in the right direction.

GRADE: C+