Final Destination 4 kinda sucked. Can the fifth movie improve things? Yes. Yes it can.
The final Final Destination movie opens like all these movies do: with a big absurd disaster that kills everybody. Perhaps what is really happening in this universe is not that Death is a Calvinist force of predestination hunting down our heroes. Maybe this is just an alternate reality where screws don't work? That neatly explains everything in these five movies.
Anyway, This time it's a big wonderfully silly bridge collapse with plenty of creative deaths. When a girl falls off the bridge to get impaled on a passing sailboat, who could not help but laugh with the movie? This is what you're here for: gore slapstick. One guy gets his face destroyed, fall off the bridge, and just for extra punishment lands on the concrete supports so he goes splat like that poor motherfucker who hit the rudder in Titanic. If that disgusts you, Final Destination 5 is not your movie. If you're applauding, you're in for a good time.
Luckily, Final Destination 5 is not so stupid it becomes purely about the gore, like Final Destination 4. The opening scenes actually establishes characters. Imagine that, you are watching people with personalities and interesting relationships. Our hero this time is Sam (Nicholas D'Agosto) who is torn between his girlfriend Molly (Emma Bell) and his dream to be a chef in Paris. Sam and Molly are pretty boring characters, but at least they have something. The dude cooks a mean breakfast.
The rest of the cast is where most of the color lies. Peter (Miles Fisher) is Sam's best friend and boss at the office they both work at. He's easily the best part of the movie and the one given the most acting to do. Peter loses his girlfriend Candice (Ellen Wroe) early on, and then breaks down during the movie. By the climax, Peter is certain that the only way to stop Death is to kill somebody else and "take their years". I should mention that Miles Fisher looks shockingly like Tom Cruise, so his final villain turn is all the more exciting. He's crazy killer Tom Cruise! That's fun, right?
I should also mention that the filler side characters have something to them. There's the sexist (and unfortunately really racist) nerdy guy (P.J. Byrne). I don't think the performance is bad but we really didn't need Jack Nicholson in The Departed-levels of rapid fire anti-Chinese bigotry. A better character is the party girl, Olivia (Jacqueline MacInnes Wood), who opens the movie showing her underwear to her coworkers and inexplicably has her own Wikipedia page. She's not relevant to the plot besides dying horribly, so I don't know why she was given her own article. She wins best death, at least. I suspect a wiki editor couldn't forget the sight of her tits and had a crush. Finally, good actors who you'd recognize like David Koechner, Courtney B. Vance, and of course, Tony Todd are in this movie.
Most of the people on Death's revenge list make his job easy for him in Final Destination 5. Olivia gets laser eye surgery. The racist guy gets acupuncture. Death has to be thinking, "there is no sport in this" when they throw him such softballs. Our hero is a chef and surrounds himself with blades. That leads me to comment on how great the suspense in Final Destination 5 is. Yeah, it certainly is scary to have your head ripped open by a falling construction crane. But also, just as scary is a screw on a balance beam, daring Candice, a gymnast, to stab her naked foot right through it. You don't cringe at the big deaths, you cringe at the small wounds you can actually imagine.
I do wish that one of the side characters had ended up the lead instead of boring Sam. Imagine if Olivia was our lead? You set up a vanilla "Final Boy" in Sam, and an obvious victim in Olivia, the slutty one. Then you twist us up by killing Sam off and leaving Olivia our heroine. Final Destination 5 does not do that, but it does have its own clever twist. There is a final reveal at the end of this movie that brings this whole franchise full circle.
I won't say that Final Destination 5 ever transcends being "just another one of those". But it is at least a good one of those. It's the best movie in the series since Final Destination 2, maybe even since the first one. The kills are great and the movie is not boring between those deaths like Final Destination 4. Plus the ending is so deliciously nasty you cannot help but love it. If you're not cheering, you're the wrong audience for this kind of schlock.
Plus, Tony Todd is back! Final Destination 3 and 4 were missing him dearly. If you're looking to improve your horror movie by a whole point, add Candyman in.
Now What?: Deep Rising (1998). I was going to watch The Craft: Legacy but that movie looks like boring dogshit. Deep Rising, however, is an underrated classic.
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