Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on basement television.
There is rumored to be a Final Destination 6 in the works, but until that happens, Final Destination 5 is the end of the series, and it means that I can put this series behind me, at least for now. Final Destination 5 seems like the end of the series that we deserve, though, or at least one that ties things up, regardless of whether or not it starts up again. On my end, I’m happy just to be done with it, even if that’s temporary.
By this time you know the setup. There’s going to be an inciting accident of which someone will have a terrible premonition. They will freak out, a group of people will follow them off whatever they are on or out of whatever they are in, and the accident will happen as foreseen. Death, having had his victims taken away, will then stalk the survivors and kill them via Rube Goldberg contraption in the order they were supposed to die. Eventually, our main character, the person who had the original premonition will figure out what is happening and will do some research on how they might survive what is happening, but Death will always win out in the end. The real question is always simply how the next person is going to die, since a) we know they will, and b) we know the order it’s going to happen.
The focal point of all of the Final Destination movies is the initial accident, and honestly, this is the best one in three movies. Our group of eventual victims is a group headed to a work retreat on a bus. Failed salesman but successful cook somehow working two full-time jobs Sam (Nicholas D’Agosto) learns that his girlfriend Molly (Emma Bell), who will also be on the retreat, is breaking up with him. This doesn’t stop his premonition, though, that the bridge they go over is going to collapse and everyone is going to die. So, of course, he freaks out and pulls Molly off the bus with him. He is pursued by Peter (Miles Fisher) and his girlfriend/intern Candice (Ellen Wroe), then by factory foreman Nathan (Alren Escarpeta), tech nerd/failed womanizer Isaac (P.J. Byrne), office bitch Olivia (Jacqueline MacInnes Wood), and their boss Dennis (David Koechner). Pay attention to the order they die in, because that’s going to be the order they die in.
Tony Todd, who was not in the fourth film (not coincidentally the worst of them) is back as the coroner for this one, showing up to give dire warnings to the survivors. The new twist is FBI agent Jim Block (Courtney B. Vance), who is initially suspicious of what is happening but slowly comes to believe that there is a touch of the supernatural in the events he is seeing.
As always with this series, the question really boils down to the quality of the deaths and the quality of how convoluted those deaths are. Beyond that, this is pretty standard fare for the series. It’s a mindless film where we’re initially shown a series of gory deaths in a particular order and the rest of the movie consists of those same people dying in different gory ways in the same order.
To be more specific, there is a particular pattern to the Final Destination movies established in the first one and essentially duplicated more or less in films 2-5. Based on the pattern suggested above, what we’re going to see is each victim in turn (again, we know the order), put into a situation. We’ll see a number of things that might figure in to their coming death in one way or another. There might be a bunch of red herrings and the death will happen in a different way, but we know it’s going to happen. The tension builds, the tension builds, and then the death happens. Every once in a while, someone will die shockingly quickly without any build up, but even that starts to fit into the pattern after awhile. And, someone will figure out a way to at least temporarily remove themselves from the list of who is going to die next, and that usually works for a bit—and it’s usually around the same time in the order of deaths.
Final Destination 5 is no different until the last few minutes, when we get something that actually provides a good amount of closure to the film and the series up to this point. Beyond that, though, the only thing you’re guessing about in the audience is exactly how each death is going to happen.
The truth is that Final Destination 5 is only notable in how it ties up the series. Other than that, it’s the same build/payoff cycle that we’ve come to expect for the previous four movies. In fact, change the character names, and this is one of the previous movies. These are all virtually identical, save for the faces of the people being torn apart.
Why to watch Final Destination 5: It completes the series (until it comes back).
Why not to watch: They kept the cheesy 3D.
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