Published on
Who would have thought when Final Destination was released the series would turn into a franchise and still be active 11 years later? Not me, that’s for sure. Somehow these movies have become even heavier carbon copies of each other than installments of the Friday The 13th series. Where Jason evolved (a little bit) over the course of the series and “original” devices were used to make the latest movie different from the previous ones the movies in the Final Destination franchise take no such risk. The only element changing every movie is the way people think they can cheat death, this time the trick is to evade your accidental death and have another person take your place. As coroner Tony Todd mentions: the books are balanced after that.
So it’s no surprise what to expect from Final Destination 5. A vision of a gruesome accident and the person having that vision then warning everybody. A select few get away from the place of the accident in time surviving it when they should have been killed. Then death comes after them one by one taking them out in various gruesome freak accidents.
Like all slasher movies, what this series basically belongs to even though the slasher is some supernatural omnipresence and not a zombie or a dream stalker, this movie is more about the inventiveness of the kills than the suspension. the moment they appear on screen it’s quite clear who’s going to die and who the final girl and/or boy are. And in true Final Destination fashion, they will die too as nobody escapes death. In these movies everybody dies which leaves us with the kills.
The kills are as elaborate as they were in the previous movies. If I remember correctly the previous movies showed you all the elements, which then eventually would all be used to have someone get killed. This time the movie leaves us guessing as multiple scenarios are hinted at with every upcoming accident. It makes the movie fun to watch but it does make me wonder where the hell the safety inspection is.
Whether you will enjoy this movie will depend on the fact whether you enjoyed the previous four movies. This movie is definitely better than the abysmal part four, but it never has the fresh feel the first one had when I saw it in the theater. That’s to much to ask of course from a part 5, but I did enjoy it. It had fun kills, a moving plot, and finally characters that were actual 20 somethings with a job rather than 20 somethings pretending to be teenagers.
What actually deserves an extra star was the ending of this movie, tying in nicely with the first movie making it feel as if everything has come full circle. As if we’ve arrived at the Final Destination.
