As I mentioned last time, horror franchises often descend into parody. But sometimes, if you’re lucky, the franchise will right itself. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, the franchise will return to what made it good in the first place.
We got lucky here.
This review contains heavy spoilers!
Final Destination 5 brings in fresh blood behind the camera and the script, and with it, a return to the moodiness of earlier installments. Much like the first and third movies, there is a focus on grief and how traumatic experiences can push people in different ways. Some respond well, committing to embracing life and everything has to offer. And some... well... I’ll get to Peter later.
The movie follows a group of coworkers who are sent on a company retreat when one of them, our protagonist Sam, suddenly has a premonition of their horrible, gruesome deaths. You all know the drill by now. He freaks out, saves some lives, and then Death has to roll up its sleeves and fix things.
The biggest, most immediate change compared to The Final Destination are the characters. They actually feel like people and aren’t horrifically annoying! Sure, Isaac is still your stereotypical perv, but even he was occasionally funny.
We also get a lot of Tony Todd. For the first time since the second movie, we actually get to see him as William Bludworth. And for multiple scenes, too!
Almost everyone had something that complicated them and deepened their characterization. Olivia had a whole life and personality that was completely separate from how she was at work. Peter and Candice’s relationship initially felt icky, given that she was an intern and appeared to be far more invested in it than he did, but Peter genuinely did love her. Even Molly was interesting simply because, for the first time, we had an actual survivor as part of the main cast.
I ended up rooting for Sam and Molly, much like I did for Wendy and Kevin back in Final Destination 3. Their relationship was very sweet.
Sure, the overall plot was a little disappointing. Two of the deaths happened before anyone realized what was happening, and even after they did learn that Death was hunting them, there really wasn’t a lot of urgency to try and stop it.
Previous movies had always, at the very least, carried a propulsive energy to them as they raced from one death scene to the next. This time, things were slower and almost low key. Sam outright states that since Death can kill him from anywhere, he might as well still go to work and live his life.
I actually wish that the movie had leaned into that idea a bit more. Sam knows that he’s last on the list. Theoretically, that should make him practically immortal. Right? He can’t die until everyone else does. That opens up a lot of potentially fun things when it comes to trying to save people, but so far, no one has taken advantage of that.
Instead, we get a different, rather intriguing wrinkle in the formula. For some reason, Bludworth decides to tell our survivors about a new way to permanently circumvent Death: murder. If you kill someone, they’ll take your place on Death’s list and you get their remaining lifespan instead.
Does it make sense? No. If anything, I’d think that the ripple effects would just piss Death off more. But as a moral quandary, I like it. Could you kill someone if your life was on the line? It’s not a new question, but I liked how it shifted the focus from Death as an antagonist to Peter.
We had a bit of that with Ian in Final Destination 3, but Peter took it to the next level. You could track his decline through each scene, whether it was through his emotional outbursts or increasingly unkempt appearance. He was grieving. He was outraged that Candice died, and Sam’s excited declaration that Molly was guaranteed to live just made it worse.
But here’s the thing. Did it actually work? Sure, Nathan accidentally killed Roy in that scuffle (which had a great moment when he fell even further into the hook) but did he steal Roy’s life or did Roy inadvertently intervene so Nathan got skipped?
And after Nathan, all of the deaths happen in the correct order. Coincidence? Or was Bludworth just wrong? You could probably make the argument either way, but I’m leaning towards the second option.
Enough about the plot. Let’s get to the important stuff: the kills!
The bridge collapse doesn’t beat the highway crash, but it occasionally comes close. I always prefer it when the disasters feel like something that could actually happen. Nascar races and roller coaster derailments feel like fantasy (even if there are plenty of examples of both of them happening) where I’ve regularly looked over the edge of a bridge and wondered about it falling.
Especially when people are actively making holes in the bridge! Bridges shouldn’t have holes in them, even if it’s for maintenance purposes!
It’s the small details, though, that linger in my mind. The splat of blood after Peter’s head hits the edge of the support pylon is such a shock of color that you can’t help but wince at it. Dennis’ death is also particularly horrific. Again, it’s the color that heightens it, the bits of pink flesh scattered throughout the black tar.
The rest of the kills are uniformly great across the board, outside of some semi-lame ones at the restaurant. As a daily glasses wearer who has debated getting LASIK, Olivia’s is absolute nightmare fuel. It is the only death that I actually fast forwarded through. The only thing that slightly ruins it is the fact that her actual cause of death is kind of lame compared to the actual laser.
Isaac’s is made great by the build up to everything going wrong. It’s a genuinely funny scene with very clever touches, like how the subtitles for the older woman only appear directly after Isaac asks for them. It’s the kind of death that lets the audience laugh and revel in what’s happening.
And it makes a very interesting contrast to Candice, which is by far my absolute favorite death in the entire series. Isaac is a creep, and the movie lets us gleefully enjoy everything that is happening to him. It’s not scary or tense. Not really. It’s fun!
Candice’s scene isn’t fun. Not in the same way. Much like Tod’s, it builds the tension until it’s suffocating, playing coy with what will be the thing that actually sets everything off. Will it be the screw on the balance beam? The water creeping to the visibly frayed wire that’s powering the fan? The uneven bars slowly becoming unscrewed?
Maybe this is a little pretentious for a Final Destination movie, but I kept thinking about Alfred Hitchcock and his “Bomb Under the Table” analogy. For those who aren’t familiar with it, Hitchcock was once asked about the difference between surprise and suspense.
Surprise, he said, is having a scene where people are talking around a table and suddenly a bomb that had been hidden under the table explodes. It’s a completely unexpected event. It’s a surprise. The audience has the same amount of information as the characters.
Suspense, in comparison, happens when you show the audience the bomb and tell them that it will go off at 1:00. Over the table, is a clock that says 12:45. Suddenly, that random conversation around the table becomes a lot more interesting. The audience is invested, sitting there mentally screaming at the characters to get out of there before the bomb explodes. They have more information than the characters.
The reason why I love Candice’s death as much as I do is that it’s one of the best examples of a “Bomb Under the Table” that I can point to. It actually marries suspense and surprise. The suspense comes from the build up and mini moments of relief when every possible trigger point is navigated.
Candice successfully gets through her balance beam routine without stepping on the screw. She plops the towel down to block the electrified water before it could reach her. She’s almost done with the uneven bars. And then within the span of seconds, everything goes wrong and Candice is a bloody pretzel on the floor.
The death itself is shocking and bracing and completely unexpected. While it was caused by all of the things that had been set up, none of them were used in the obvious way. Someone else stepped on the screw. And it wasn’t the wire that we needed to be worried about, but the fan that it was powering.
I actually yelped the first time that I saw it, and immediately rewound so that I could watch it all again. It’s really the epitome of what the franchise is known for and what it does so well.
Overall, some of the CGI is a little distracting. It’s 3D again, although luckily far more subtle than in The Final Destination. I really only noticed it in a few places, namely Peter’s premonition death and Olivia’s eye. It didn’t ruin my enjoyment by any means.
Alright, I’m going to talk about the ending now, and while someone may naturally assume that such a discussion would involve spoilers, I want to take the time to give everyone a chance to stop reading now if they haven’t seen the movie. Seriously. Go watch the movie first before reading any further.
Are we good?
Okay.
So... yeah. Surprise! I did not pick up on any of the foreshadowing the first time I watched, but it’s almost obvious in hindsight. (My favorite kind of foreshadowing.)
It’s not just that they mention Paris a ton, or that the restaurant that Sam is sent to is the same one that will crush Carter with a sign. It’s not that the fashion is a little off, or that the technology and phones are ten years out of date, or that if you were paying attention and studied Isaac’s massage voucher that you could see the expiration date of 2001. It’s not even that no one mentions any specific instances of this happening before, with even Bludworth only speaking in generalities. It’s all of it combined.
It’s the pit in your stomach as you watch Alex scream about how the plane is going to crash, already knowing how it’s going to end because Final Destination 5 is not a sequel. It’s a prequel.
And it’s just a fabulous twist that is incredibly well done. It fits the more somber tone of the movie, too. There is no triumph, but it’s also not some quick, last second stinger either; that’s reserved for Nathan. Proper time is given to Molly, and especially to Sam as they die. It’s treated like the tragedy that it is.
Random Thoughts
I love the opening credits. They were so cool.
The bridge collapsed significantly faster in “real life” than it did in Sam’s premonition. Distractingly so.
Miles Fisher (Peter) is also a singer, and his music video for the song “New Romance” is a Saved by the Bell parody where everyone is killed in horrible accidents. A lot of the actors in the movie were also in the video. It’s fun and worth checking out.
I guess The Final Destination’s title is still technically accurate. Chronologically, it is the last one. (Barring Bloodlines, of course, which I have not seen yet.)
~~~~
An Honest Fangirl loves video games, horror movies, and superheroes, and occasionally manages to put words together in a coherent and pleasing manner.
Great review/s!
ReplyDeleteI have also reviewed the entire franchise.