Death is back and he’s pissed. (She’s pissed? It’s pissed? They’re pissed? Skip it.) All these damn kids and their iPods and baggy jeans and living past the age of 25. Final Destination 5 is a movie so cynical that I imagine the pre-film meeting had no actors going over lines and instead was simply the producer on the phone with the CGI guys, “can we make a bridge disintegrate? Great. Can we smash a guy’s head open with a Buddha statue? No, the fat one. Great. Ok, now here’s a tricky one – I want a screaming woman to smash through a 4th story window and fall so hard on a car that her eyeball falls out. You can do that? And can you follow it with a car squishing the detached eye? Super, we’re ready to roll.” The effects are first rate. So much so that when a screw comes loose from a fan in the ceiling of an arena 200 feet above a gymnastics floor and lands point up on the balance beam, I found that more believable than a good-bye kiss between leads Sam (Nicholas D’Agosto) and Molly (Emma Bell).
Final Destination has not changed script in five films. Bunch of kids get in a vehicle; brilliant extended tragedy happens; turns out to be a vision; augur-enabled dude saves everybody only to find death taking them one-by-one for the rest of the film. Predictable plots tend to turn an audience off. On the other hand, this film is the current reason for 3D. And given that 3D probably needs a good reason to exist about now, FD has a home. Every FD film has at least one scene of a rod-like projectile entering the back of the head and emerging through an eye socket and into your lap. Shock value alone does have merit.
Unfortunately, that’s pretty much all Final Destination 5 has: shock value and a series of gory Rube Goldbergian death scenes. There is fun to be had in the fantastical death guessing game. The direction sets each scene up with all the elements that will combine to slay another “lucky survivor”. Can you figure out how it’s going to happen? Will the moose head on the wall dislodge? Will a stray power line dislodge and slice through a guy? I figure if the film can fool you a bit, it wins, because this is really the only reason to show up. There’s also a sick pleasure in showing all the potential elements of death. Late in the game, our hero Sam checks in for his job as assistant chef. My, a working kitchen simply abounds with tools of damage, don’t it? Go ahead and laugh; there’s no reason to take any of this seriously.
Rated R, 92 Minutes
D: Steven Quale
W: Eric Heisserer, Jeffrey Reddick
Genre: Lame excuse to show 3D impalement
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Future serial killers
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: The squeamish
