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Film Review: Final Destination 5, Reviews

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Let’s take a look at the numbers. Final Destination 3: $54.1 million at the US box office. The Final Destination (a.k.a. ‘Final Destination 4’): $66.4 million. Final Destination 5: $32.3 million. This is depressing, because it means there’s no financial upside (quite the opposite) in putting some thought into a sequel, as opposed to doing it cynically and shoddily. Final Destination 5 flopped, yet it totally re-charges a franchise that seemed to be running on empty. It’s still a Final Destination movie, with all of the series’ dubious qualities – all-pervading callousness, sadistic deaths with lip-smacking levels of splatter – but it has humour and suspense, and even heart. Newbie director Steven Quale genuinely tried to make a good film out of a well-worn formula; it’s too bad his efforts weren’t appreciated by the mass audience.

 The plot is familiar: “Death doesn’t like to be cheated”, so a small group of survivors from a fatal accident (a collapsing bridge, in this case) are stalked one-by-one by the Grim Reaper. Even from the early scenes, however, there’s more of a spark than expected. For a start, our heroes aren’t the usual random teens but corporate colleagues on their way to an office retreat, so there’s more scope for witty interaction. Olivia is the office slut, Isaac the womanising tech-support guy with the tact and sensitivity of tech-support guys everywhere. Peter is having a fling with youthful intern Candice. Nathan is the new factory foreman, butting heads with the union rep because he’s young, black and college-educated (yup, social comment in a Final Destination film). Dennis – played by the great David Koechner – is the pushy, tyrannical manager (“What is the ONE THING we can’t recycle?”; “Wasted time, sir.”). Molly has just broken up with Sam (Nicholas D’Agosto), our wide-eyed, rather insecure hero. He’s the one who has a premonition of the bridge collapsing, saving his co-workers and pissing off Death, or Fate, or whatever.

 Previous FD films used our knowledge of the franchise as a licence to be lazy, leaving out connective tissue and mechanically focusing on gory deaths. This one is smarter, using it for suspense. We know what’s going to happen and wait for our heroes to catch up, drawing out the tension. They, on the other hand, struggle to make sense of their plight, dwelling on their friends’ sudden deaths: how could Candice die doing gymnastics, asks Peter (she’s the first to go, as we knew she would be)? How could Isaac meet his death in a massage parlour? The rules of the game are explained, this time with a wrinkle: if you kill someone – a stranger, say – he or she takes your place on Death’s list, and you get the years they would’ve lived.

 The script uses impending doom for sly jokes. At the funeral service for the accident victims, Dennis mistakenly includes Isaac on the list of the deceased, a joke both on the main plot (no, he’s not dead; but he will be!) and the callousness of office life: it’s no accident that Sam isn’t suited to the corporate environment (dreaming instead of being a chef), or that the film prods our heroes into a world of “kill or be killed”, a mirror-image of their own world. FD 5 also plays the death scenes for suspense, making splendid use of red herrings. Candice’s death-by-gymnastics orchestrates a domino effect, dropping a nail (sharp side up) on the balance beam just as Candice starts her routine. When will her foot come down on the sharp point? – but in fact Quale milks the scene patiently, then resolves it with a wild (and suitably disgusting) punchline. Even better is the film’s most excruciating death, an eye operation gone wrong, with extreme close-ups of the bulging eyeball intercut with inserts of a teddy bear being clutched by the nervous victim.  

 Final Destination 5 isn’t for everyone, and not just because of the violence. Even with the unexpected skill on display, it’s no horror masterpiece – just a nice surprise for those of us who’ve known the franchise for years, and despaired of it after the dire fourth instalment. The CGI is weak (the collapsing bridge looks weirdly insubstantial) and the 3D irrelevant. The ending is seriously botched: the two epilogue scenes should’ve been switched, with the ‘meta’ element coming right at the end, and that meta-ending – a nod to the first FD, whose own ending was devilishly clever – should’ve been a quick joke, not a drawn-out horror show like it is now.

 Then there’s the moral aspect of the franchise as a whole, trivialising Death and laughing at people’s suffering. One recalls Albert Brooks’ famous speech in Broadcast News, when he explains how the Devil – if and when he appears in the world – will slowly engineer our moral decline, just by keeping us happy and “just lowering standards, bit by little bit”. Final Destination was decried as cruel and insensitive when it appeared 11 years ago – but now (like the Saw films) it’s taken for granted. The closing credits, flashing back to gory deaths over the four previous movies, have the air of a valediction, and maybe it’s best for this nasty little franchise to shuffle off its cinematic coil. If it must be done, however, Final Destination 5 – skilful, smart and a return to form, whatever the numbers say – is the way to do it.