Review: Final Destination 5 (2011)

Final Destination 5 (2011)

DIRECTOR: Steven Quale
SCREENWRITER: Eric Heisserer (based on characters by Jeffrey Reddick)

I had seen the previous four Final Destination movies but did not get round to having a repeat marathon before seeing this new entry. That matters little since every film essentially has the same plot (with only the first two films building an arc of sorts while subsequent films make references to previous ones while deaths from all the films are recreated or replayed as a montage in the fourth and fifth films). Kim Newman compares the films to the Road Runner animations in which the same joke happens again. Technically, as the "villain" - i.e. Death - has no visual form besides its manipulation of the environment then it requires no makeover should the series be rebooted and it can go on forever (perhaps, ironically, outliving its audience). Newman also points out the element of "safety in the workplace" and this might have played into the terror I experienced in this entry whereas previous viewings mainly concerned seeing how the deaths were staged.

This might be the best entry in the series since my favourite, Final Destination 2 (2003), the one which for me set the series as fun B-movies though I felt Final Destination 3 (2006) was too cartoony but I had fun with "The Final Destination" (2009), the first in 3D. Final Destination 5 is an example of proof, if needed, that 3D, if needed, is better used for trashy fun horror cinema (another example being Resident Evil: Afterlife, which sees a hot woman - Ali Larter also from the first two Final Destinations - battling a monster while water sprinkles down in slow-motion). The only thing that needs working on is the colour reduction (apparently the makers of Saw 3D turned up the brightness, which explains the fan-criticized "pink" blood).

Despite the fourth film promising to be THE Final Destination (which brings to mind Monty Python's The Meaning of Life including a chapter called The MEANING of Life, with emphasis on MEANING provided by the Narrator), there is a neat ending to this entry which somewhat justifies its existence (without giving too much away, I will just say that "5" is just a number) and this will probably, at least for now, really be the final destination.

This is probably also the only Final Destination to star lookalikes of both Tom Cruise (Miles Fisher) and David Milliband (Nicholas D'Agosto), the former's resemblance arguably being one of the scariest things in the film, besides the cringing health-and-safety hazards as Death sets of the Domino effects, and the gruesome deaths - the most gross-out involving the breaking of pretty much every bone in the body.