Final Destination 5, 2011.
Directed by Steven Quale.
Starring Nicholas D’Agosto, Emma Bell, Miles Fisher, Arlen Escarpeta, David Koechner
and Tony Todd.
SYNOPSIS:
A group of co-workers face a race against time to escape Death’s sinister agenda after they survive a terrifying suspension bridge collapse.
For the last 11 years we’ve watched people get sliced, decapitated, hung, stabbed, impaled, and blown up, among other things, in the Final Destination series. What else could they possibly do in a 5th movie?
Like the first four movies we get someone who has a vision of a horrible accident about to happen and then rescues his friends, and possibly other, from the situation only to have death hunt them down and try to finish what he started. This time around we have Sam played by Fired Up’s Nicholas D’Agosto. He sees that him and his friends are supposed to die in a horrific bridge collapse, but safely gets a handful of his friends off their bus before it happens. Along for the ride are The Walking Dead’s Emma Bell, Tom Cruise look-a-like Miles Fisher, the Friday the 13th remake’s Arlen Escarpeta, Anchorman’s David Koechner, and a slew of people you’ve probably never seen before. As the movie progresses one by one they start to die in the order they would have in the accident they all avoided. Once they learn that death is out to get them they try to do whatever they can to avoid death once more.
In more ways than not this is exactly like the first four movies. Same set-up, characters you don’t care about, bad acting, death’s pattern is the same, etc. They do try and bring back what made the first two movies in the franchise entertaining and fun but they don’t end up executing it well enough. A lot of the deaths still feel very cartoonish because of the heavy CGI on most of them and the 3D adds nothing to any of the deaths.
They do try to add some small things that differ from the previous movies. For instance, if you kill someone who wasn’t already supposed to die then that would cancel out your death and you’d be off the hook. Also what they do with the ending I thought was very creative. I won’t spoil anything but they do find a nice way to tie in this movie with the first movie. While I did like the ending I did not like the, literally, last two minutes because they go out of their way to do something that is just even more ridiculous than most of the deaths in the movie.
As far as the acting goes your not going to find anyone here who is giving a good performance. All of the kids are mostly hamming it up every second their on camera and David Koechner is clearly there just for the comic relief. We get a pointless character in an agent, played by Courtney B. Vance, who is interested in finding out what is happening to these people that survived the bridge accident. Tony Todd makes a cameo appearance that isn’t much but he at least tries in his very short amount of screen time.
The deaths I found to be pretty weak. They actually started off great with the first death but then turned into great build-ups and then blowing it on the actual death. Most of the deaths don’t look too good either because they are all CG and it just makes them look too unreal. Had they at least maybe tried to use some practical effects I think the deaths would have had more impact that just looking like a cartoon.
All in all this movie does have some entertaining moments and the ending, except for the final two minutes, is done really well. It’s not as good as the first two movies in the franchise but it definitely beats part three, and is leagues better than part four.
Jake Peffer
Originally published January 27, 2012. Updated April 10, 2018.
