Final Destination 5 Review

So brutally tense that this movie might just be your Final Destination.

If you are familiar with your Final Destination folklore, you will know what you are plonking that ten dollar bill down for – three dollars to watch a bunch of young people peddle their attractiveness in big screen glory and seven dollars to watch them die in the most imaginative and horrific way possible. The idea of what makes a Final Destination movie tick doesn’t seem lost on the filmmakers as you are forced to sit through an unpretentiously enthusiastic, if overly protracted title sequence that unremorsefully shoves the various tools of death and shards after shards of broken glass in your face. What makes Final Destination 5 any different and better than any of its antecedents are the set-ups in which the characters are doomed to their demise – they are more cleverly scripted, more elaborate and last longer.

At the start of the film, we learn that a group of office workers from a paper company are heading for a corporate team building retreat. David Koechner portrays the inscrutable manager who seems anathema to the notion of bonding with his colleagues while Nathan (Arlen Escarpeta) is the supervisor who sees the trip as a reprieve from the contumacious blue-collar workers he oversees. Sam (Nicholas D’Agosto) is the dreamy chap who is undecided over a culinary apprenticeship that could distance himself from his newly estranged girlfriend (Emma Bell). Best friend Peter (Miles Fisher) and his girlfriend Candice (Ellen Wroe), together with the lascivious Issac (P.J. Byrne) who is constantly trying to hit on his sexy, albeit slightly slutty co-worker Olivia (Jacqueline Maclnnes Wood) round up the cast.

En route to the destination, their bus is stopped by ongoing construction works on a suspension bridge. In fine Final Destination style, Sam has a vision of the fatal bridge collapse that is about to happen. Upon awaking from his vision, Sam warns his co-workers of the impending danger and of course the few who heed his advice to escape have to be a bunch of people with colourful yet ultimately mismatched personalities so there would be fair bit of melodrama to invest us in the film in between the wait for the survivors to get picked off by death one by one. You don’t actually think they could cheat death, do you?

There is without question that the real juice of any Final Destination movie lies in the scenes in which we get to see the characters scream for divine intervention before an intestine or two spills or a head gets minced into mashed potatoes. It is an acquired brand of morbid fantasy and mirthless humour that has been entertaining audiences for eleven years. Final Destination 5 does little to revise these ambitions – but lots to improve at what it does best. Save David Koechner the unlikeable manager who has the quickest edit of a death, the survivors meet their deaths in a less random manner. By means of a witty script, you will see Issac’s lust betray his survival instead of a passing train fling a piece of scrap metal into the neck of an unsuspecting victim.

For most parts, neophyte director Steven Quale would have you biting your nails or desperately clinging onto your partner’s arms because he is excellent at parlaying red herrings into brutal dosages of tension. In any given set-up, death could easily come in any form – the small pool of water that is exposed to electricity, the screw that always seems to come loose, the fire on the candle that has a habit of perpetually whiffing dangerously close to flammable material or the machine that looks like it could malfunction the next second. And it is usually one of those that starts the ball rolling but there is always a wicked twist, at times more than one, to the character’s most obvious cause of death. It is a guessing game that goes unchecked for an extended period of time so you are able to soak in all the suspense before said character is delivered a sudden and often unexpected blow that puts him or her out for good. You would have to suspend your belief that a bubble in a water dispenser could actually cause a wobble strong enough to topple a full cup of water or an adult woman could actually limp right into a glass panel and fall right through it. But this is Final Destination 5 – and everything qualifies as a hazard.

Elsewhere, we have effective editing to thank for moving the movie forward at a brisk pace. Less time is spent celebrating tired Final Destination paraphernalia – like the scenes in which the remaining survivors get so mentally disturbed and confused that they begin to scribble nonsense down on a notebook and try to figure out how to avert the next disaster – and more on making Final Destination 5 feel more refreshing than its predecessors. Unlike Scream 4 which is satisfied with parodying itself and other horror thriller flicks for much of the time, Final Destination 5 actually introduces a new rule to survival this time around. If the survivors want to live, they have to kill someone else. This actually serves to create interesting bouts of animosity and strains in relationships among the survivors as they struggle with their moralities. That is before one guy becomes psycho enough to actually kill a police officer and if you have watched Scream 4 and the like before – you know the rest.

If you, at this point, maintain that it is perfectly fine to plonk that ten dollar bill down for Final Destination 5, I would recommend that you whip some spare two dollar bills out for the 3D edition of the movie. Admittedly, I do not really favour the medium – in part due to the notoriously careless (and haphazard) use of 3D by several filmmakers to drum up interest in dismal movies, as well as the exertion on my eyes and the inevitable headaches – but when I feel that a movie is best viewed in 3D, I will enjoy the film in 3D. Final Destination 5 is one of those rare movies. It is a natural fit because of weapons that come at you, blood that splatters in your face and innards that fly towards you. Unlike other movies, these things function as the crux of Final Destination 5 and the result is 3D that doesn’t feel forceful.