Final Destination 5 Movie Review: Death Returns in Fine Form

There is no doubt that the Final Destination movies are, for the most part, top-tier slasher/horror/gore movies. The deaths are entertaining and always over-the-top. It is fun to guess where the Rube-Goldberg brutality will end up after endless twists and turns. Since the minor disappointment that was The Final Destination (the fourth film in the series, and still worth seeing), the franchise bounces back with Stephen Quale’s Final Destination 5. 

All Final Destination movies begin with a young adult experiencing an extremely lifelike premonition of an upcoming catastrophe. In Final Destination 5, a group of office workers (we are not told the work they do, and the filmmakers are correct that we don’t care) are taking a bus to a work retreat and cross a bridge that is currently under maintenance. One of the bus riders, Sam Lawton (Nicholas D’Agosto), has a premonition that the bridge and their bus will kill them all as they fall into the river below. The destruction of the bridge is the most spectacular of all the set pieces in all six movies. It plays on our fears of heights, deep water, car crashes, and more. Sam freaks out and is able to get several people off the bus before the accident occurs, saving them all while simultaneously cheating death.

As per most Final Destination films, the survivors begin to be killed off in the order they would have died in the crane collapse. The deaths in 5 are the best in the series: the gymnastics accident; the LASIK eye-surgery debacle; and many more since there is a large number of “survivors.” The movies insinuate there may be rules for how to cheat death. Here, recurring character Bludworth (Tony Todd) tells the survivors that death will not be cheated, but that if you kill another human you will steal the years they had left to live. This leads to excellent scenes in which characters violently turn on one another – a first for the franchise. Although Bludworth always has interesting advice, the running gag is that none of it ever seems to work as planned.

An interesting side effect of Final Destination movies is that everything around you begins to look like a potential disaster. Just hearing a train whistle can raise the hair on the back of your neck. The deaths tend to follow certain patterns that somehow have not gotten old. There will be a leak of some liquid. There will be an electrical short or a spark of some kind. There will be many, many red herrings. When Final Destination works best is when it plays upon our childhood fears and urban legends. That LASIK surgery moment really hurts down to the bone. You won’t hear the twist ending in this review; just know it is the best in the series. Final Destination 5 has the best acting, the best deaths, and brings the franchise to new, golden heights.