Review: Final Destination 5

We obviously can’t have a scary movie in this century without huge explosions, flying objects and blood squirting in our faces. Right from the beginning, Final Destination 5 obnoxiously boasts its expensive technological advances in CGI with an excruciatingly long opening credits involving a random series of broken glass, bloody fingers, skulls and just about any spiked objects you can possibly pierce through a body. Okay, I got my fix! I’m ready to leave now.

If we’re not tired of this by the fifth time, I guess there’s no hope for improvement. Or at least no expectation for some drastic turn of events. This movie was made for fans of the previous Final Destination installments and for anyone with a desperate fix for blood, guts, and colourful death sequences. Director Steven Quale definitely stays true to the series and in doing so doesn’t give us anything we haven’t seen before. Everybody dies within the first 15 minutes and then we realize it was just a premonition. Sam Lawton (Nicholas D’Agosto), a worker at a paper plant and part-time chef (mainly because we need an excuse for a kitchen death scene), ends up saving some of his co-workers but of course, we know they’re about to die, one by one.

Don’t get upset if you can’t really connect to the characters. They’re meant to die, otherwise this wouldn’t be entertaining. But don’t blame me for expecting a little more. There’s no better way to describe the acting throughout the film than how a customer described Sam’s cooking: ‘flat, with no flavor’. Watching the cast jump at every musical cue as we impatiently wait for flickering lights, a mechanical malfunction or a broken nail to cause the most fantastic freak accidents, I wonder if I’d have more fun in an amusement park on Halloween.

At least writer Eric Heiserer has a sense of humor. Death, personified by Tony Todd says, “I’ve seen this before,” reminding us of an episode on Supernatural with all this talk about a ‘wrinkle in reality.’ When less than half of the characters remain, the last few standing try to rationalize a way to break the spell. Besides failing to be scary, Final Destination 5 can’t be considered a complete failure. For a film that really has no freedom to step outside the box, we do get quite a bit of comedic relief that gives it just enough juice to keep trucking on for over a decade now. Apparently, we’ll never run out of finding new and exciting ways to kill people, and we definitely won’t run out of young teenagers that enjoy watching these gruesome deaths take place…now in 3D.

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