In short: Final Destination 5 (2011)

By the time the fifth Final Destination movie rolled around, even the chaps at New Line Cinema (at least those that weren’t so embarrassed by the fourth film they still thought about the franchise at all) must have realized that the series’ basic idea actually lends itself very badly to it being a franchise, what with its lack of a visible antagonist (which ironically was one of the strengths of the first pre-franchise film) or much room for any interesting plotting. Sure, you can do another round of Rube Goldberg device style deaths interspersed with some more in your face carnage and invent another new rule for death (or is it Death?) to follow and roll out Tony Todd again to expose about it, but even an undemanding audience is going to get bored by the shtick rather sooner than later, particularly since the fourth and worst film already promised to be the last one. The film at hand actually tries to get around that last problem with a particularly smug gotcha ending, so I’ll probably have to at least give it credit for trying.

Otherwise, the producers kinda-sorta listened to their hearts and waved the series goodbye with Steven Quale’s outing (written by Eric Heisserer who seems to have specialized in nearly good scripts before hitting the big leagues in critical acclaim for the nearly good script to Arrival) with kills too full of references to the originals to be exciting for anyone not interested in the minutiae of the franchise, a particularly ill fitting new rule for Death, and said twist ending that would be clever if it weren’t so annoying in its smugness.


The new batch of Death meat is okay enough – though I certainly prefer the victims from films one and three – but I can’t say the film does terribly much for me, seeing as it just repeats the stuff that was original in the first movie and fun in the first three, and adds little to it but that most horrible of things – continuity wank.