FINAL DESTINATION 5
2011
Directed by Steven Quale
Written by Eric Heisserer
Of course, Final Destination 5 only really exists because the fourth film in the series, The Final Destination, made a lot of money; yet it's pleasant to think, and there are signs to suggest, that it exists because The Final Destination is bad, and despite the clear implications of its stupid title, it would've been a sad and unsatisfying way to conclude one of the signature achievements of horror in the 00s. And indeed, it is for the reason that Final Destination 5 does offer a worthy conclusion—a film that, had we been more fortunate, could have worn the title "The Final Destination" with honor—that I'm much less prone to use phrases like "bust-out" and "exploitation" with it, and more prone to interpret its comparatively quick churn out of the Final Destination workshop in 2011 (not even quite two years separate it and The Final Destination, representing the fastest turnaround in the franchise's history) as something less like a last-chance cash-grab and more like an urgent need to set things right.
There wasn't much question this time that it was the last chance—producers Craig Perry and Warren Zide had been expecting to close the series down since Final Destination 3—and, surely, 5 speaks for itself in that regard, just by actually being the final Final Destination, at least until the franchise's 2025 relaunch. As had all its predecessors, Final Destination 5 turned a handsome profit—admittedly less than The Final Destination, the 2009 film having been buoyed by the flushest tides of the 3-D boom—but I think there were always doubts that dogged this franchise's creators, mainly revolving around the more-or-less objective fact that, love 'em or leave 'em, the Final Destinations are inevitably hidebound and repetitive films, even by the standards of the slasher, where being hidebound and repetitive is practically a selling point. Conceptually, narratively, and even stylistically, they're pretty limited things, constrained by a formula that, precisely because it is so good, is also almost impossible to modify, except cosmetically (and, usually, barely that). Moreover, they're just difficult, thanks to their premise and, indeed, thanks to their legend, because while any conventional slasher franchise can bank on violent struggle being theoretically compelling with any bit of novelty thrown in, the Final Destinations, which are very hard to bring real novelty into, nevertheless demand substantial novelty to work. For that matter, I think we could pose a philsophical question as to whether they truly do have "struggle" or even "violence" in the first place. But either way, you still have to come up with a whole bunch of insane death sequences that we haven't seen before, that strain physical plausibility, but only in the right ways, and, always, utilize the quotidian stuff of everyday existence. (And if I've complained about all the surprise reevaluations I've had to make over the course of this retrospective—this is another!—I think a lot of that comes from how repetitive they are, my previous opinions being formed from marathoning the whole series in a couple of days, which I conclude is just not a good way to watch Final Destinations.)
So it's painstaking and sweaty work, a Final Destination, or at least a good one is—either way your reward is being called "dumb"—and, with the franchise's possibility space being increasingly exhausted, the sense is they wanted it to end, still-profitable or not. Thus Final Destination 5 did so, and it goes for its finality pretty damned hard—as hard as I can conceive could be done by a horror series with essentially no continuing story and no ability to ever overthrow its "villain"—short, anyway, of Death orchestrating an accidental thermonuclear exchange with some wayward luftballons.
With the foregoing in mind, I find it easier to respect Final Destination 5 than I once did, though it'll still sometimes make that difficult, especially in its first few minutes of narrative. Though before that, we're treated to a variation, perhaps not a hugely creative one, on the title sequence of The Final Destination. The previous installment's titles had tried "summing up" the series already, and it turned out to be the solitary thing about that movie that bothered. Unfortunately, it probably had the better ideas for it, and 5 is thereby left with this: objects that were part of previous films' death sequences flying at the camera through shattering panes of glass with the titles on them (5 is also a 3-D movie, mind you, and though I can only compare their 2-D home video presentations, I'm still pretty sure it's the superior 3-D Final Destination, even judged solely on those terms; The Final Destination's reliance on CGI is also drawn back a tad, and much improved when they have to rely on it regardless). Anyway, sometimes the reference is immediately recognizable (the fire escape ladder), sometimes it's obscure ("bloody scissors" must be either misrepresenting the previous film's hairdresser death or, I guess, confusing it with Dead Again), sometimes it's individual glass UV lamps (which just seems like an odd thing to fling at glass), sometimes it's, like, skulls. It's less imaginative, but it's better-realized than the previous film's; and this time, Brian Tyler's title theme finds a better balance between amoral shock show fun and an actually-serious morbidity. Just like the movie itself.
So, in what I assume must be Michigan again though some say New York, there is a paper factory—reasonably enough, right? for as we've recently discussed paper is still an important industry, that didn't just die when the Internet happened—whose adjoining office is run by Dennis (David Koechner) but is evidently staffed primarily, if not exclusively, by 20-somethings, and the big boss has lately decreed that his white-collar workers shall go on a team-building retreat, which seems at odds with his unwillingness to learn their names or treat them like humans. Nonetheless, they're all about to depart on a charter bus, its important passengers being: Sam (Nicholas D'Agosto), who's actually working two fulltime jobs, both paper salesman and line cook at a high-end French restaurant, and is presently deciding whether to take his latter employer's offer to train him as a full chef in Paris, which sounds naggingly familiar but let's leave it be; Molly (Emma Bell), his paper co-worker and, as of her announcement of the fact this morning, his ex-girlfriend; Peter (Miles Fisher), his intermediate boss and friend; Candice (Elle Wroe), college-aged intern and Peter's girlfriend, whose more dearly-held hopes revolve around a gymnastics career; Nathan (Arlen Escarpeta), the fresh-out-of-school plant manager undergoing friction with his blue-collar subordinates like Roy (Brent Strait); Olivia (Jacqueline MacInnes Wood), a party girl with an inappropriate sense of humor who doesn't like her eyeglasses even if, some say, they make her look like Lisa Loeb, which is an oddly-dated reference to make here in 2011, though in fairness I got it; and Isaac (P.J. Palmer), a douchebag, because we're only technically out of the 00s—and they pull you right back in, don't they? Wink.
Still, it's worth taking a second to notice how much detail I was able to put into this cast of a Final Destination movie. It's superfluous for a review, perhaps, but it goes to the point that after three entries a Final Destination screenwriter—in this case new blood Eric Heisserer*—is again making some token effort to slightly round these figures rather than treating them as purely instrumental bloodbags (only Isaac sucks, and while Olivia is an archetypal Slasher Movie Slut, there's a vague willingness to move her 5-10% off from pure cliche), as well as to take a stab at the original Final Destination's notion of members of a community haunted (but literally) by the communal tragedy they survived.
The bad news is this is slammed into the movie at maximum speed, despite an opening sequence on the longer side (it was weird to realize that 3's, with its all-annoying-cartoon cast, indulged in the series' very longest); it's as much a matter of this opening sequence being especially burly, though that doesn't excuse the shuddering awfulness of the first, say, twenty lines of dialogue here, where everyone's character sketch has to be essentially recited aloud, even when unnecessary. And it's egregiously unnecessary when we get a miserably-written verbal catfight to establish an enmity between Candice and Olivia, characters who, I'm almost certain, never interact again. But effort is appreciated, and, anyway, we've got the tragedy, a collapse of Vancouver, MI's Lions Gate Bridge, as foreseen by Sam, and it finds the Final Destinations reaching for the fullest possible disaster cinema scale: unlike the characterization, it manages to ramp its way up with some patience and palpable dread before unleashing some excellent destruction upon our characters one-by-one—even in the prevision, they almost escape, only most of them ultimately fail—with some spectacularly varied modes of death, and an insistence upon 3-D-style staging (and 3-D-style gore) that's gratifying, even in a 2-D presentation. Now, it's let down by a pretty hellacious flaw: in a film series that's as much as anything "about" physics, it's pretty obnoxious that when Isaac's accidentally left on the bus and the bus tumbles into the expanding hole in the bridge, how instantaneously you realize the physics are bad—he falls and hits the glass front of the bus during the plunge, when you know, as a matter of instinct, that he'd be in freefall—but this is substantially made up for by people being skewered, smacked with suspension cables, boiled with road tar, and so forth. And by now, you know the drill: Sam snaps back to reality, and saves them, but Death isn't having it.
I do not at all want to oversell how well this works as "a story," but neither do I want to punish it for trying to be one, at least achieving a modicum of thematic heft with its central relationship that's failing mostly because our hero is determined to stick to his holding pattern rather than living his life to its fullest, and it doesn't suffer unduly from bad performances, either—I mean, all involved seem to understand acting is supposed to have emotions—even if I'd hesitate to declare even the interesting performances truly effective (Fisher, as a result of the plot, is Tom Cruising his way to sociopathy, whereas Wood, I might even say giving the best of the 20-something performances here and certainly the toughest—though that's a distinct category in a movie that does what this one does to Olivia—seems to have a significantly better-worked-out understanding of her Slut's interiority than the movie itself could possibly have time to care about). Even Palmer's douchey comic relief, while mostly unfunny (not anything but gross sexual overtures far outrunning his charisma), is recognizable as comic relief, rather than just an emanation of the times. But let's also note Heisserer and director Steve Quale (like David R. Ellis, a second unit director, and for Cameron, no less) do find some space for the morbid atmosphere of an office emptied by mass death, not to mention the sour note of commentary about a corporation that, when faced with a large fraction of its employees dying, closes the branch and fires the survivors. They're also bringing "mystery" back as a storytelling mode, though this might be the most unsuccessful thing the movie attempts since it means a fair amount of wheel-spinning with an FBI agent (Courtney B. Vance) who keeps thinking "terrorism" (rather unaccountably even before you step back after the end to contemplate things), but who doesn't have an actual function till very late in the day and not much of one then.
Meanwhile, Final Destination 5 is only somewhat above middling at its primary purpose: the actual death sequences. Like I said, these movies are, maybe even counter-intuitively, hard. But even then, this one is still working hard, and it vaults over the tired, indifferent demeanor of its immediate predecessor. It unfortunately peaks early, with its first death sequence being its best, though it takes such a high spot on my Final Destination death leaderboards I barely even mind, with Death striking Candice at a gymnastics practice—so it is, at least, my favorite setting for a death in the whole franchise. It must be the squirmiest of all Final Destination deaths, on the basis of a screw that winds up on a balance beam, unbeknownst to its users, while their bare feet—in the kind of insert montage that elicits audible sounds of distress, in this living room at least—keep barely missing the sharp metal object. It's actually much more complicated than just that, slowly building an arena of horror out of exposed wires, pools of water, the constancy of inherently dangerous athletic movement, and the infernal sounds the equipment makes, and if it loses any points—sadly, it does—it's because it feels like one of those Final Destination deaths that should use every element it's established, since as complex as it is, with just the littlest bit more elbow grease it could've gone all the way; and because it might be the only Final Destination death that needed less elaborate gore, overcooking a death that is, simultaneously, the series' most nerve-wrackingly "coincidental" yet, otherwise, one of its most physically-plausible. But it's still a hall-of-famer.
5's other most-famed death sequence, which I think consensus fixates upon even more—perhaps because horror fans are less likely to be graceful athletes than people in need of corrected vision—is Olivia's demise resulting from an out-of-control eye surgery laser, which is awfully good in its construction, but exists in that category of Final Destination death that, for Death's sake, requires a machine to be pretty much an entirely different machine than what the movie says it is (and in the case of the tumble through plate glass that actually kills her, a material to be an entirely different material—without any dedicated set-up, either, regarding this particular pane's weakness). There's a certain unignorable bullshit to Olivia's death, then (more than I've even mentioned), though I'd ultimately give it a pass thanks to the aforementioned construction, and the, shall we say, nerve of its 3-D final beat. Isaac expires in a massage parlor he's mistaken for a handjob joint—well, that tracks—and the actual action is pretty good and nasty, with a couple of misdirects (gory acupuncture, fire) that send him to the right place to ultimately have his noggin caved in, and it's likeable enough despite its unlikeable protagonist, though it suffers unnecessarily from a buffering transition back to Sam and co. that makes it feel like it's the longest damn death sequence in the franchise, for if you counted the time back at the office as a part of "the sequence," it literally would be.
This is, also, the complete list of Final Destination 5's real-deal death sequences. There are other deaths, and pretty solid ones, as far as gore effects go, but they're vastly less baroque, and one of them visits upon someone completely outside of Death's design—ah, but that brings us to the wrinkle Heisserer's invented, for that difficult-to-achieve novelty.
Bringing it in is the clumsiest part of his screenplay: for this last Final Destination, franchise "host" William Bludworth (Tony Todd; is he ever named such onscreen?) returns, to creepily stalk our principals, which is eventually explained as something more anodyne (he's a coroner now; across six films, they posit no fewer than three entirely-distinct death-related professions for Bludworth that I'm pretty sure the series' writers must believe are stops on the same career track), though his purpose is to drop some new lore, intimating that if Death is after you, but you kill somebody, you mystically switch fates, and you acquire their lifespan. Now, I feel like Heisserer was after a Final Destination even more resembling the supernatural rules-driven thrills of Death Note, but I'm of two minds about the idea: on one hand, it is a novelty, and it makes a superficial metaphysical sense, and it throws a moral wrench into the machinery that could be and, let's agree, is good for the drama of a fundamentally somewhat undramatic franchise, once Peter commits himself to homicidal resentment towards our sole principal who wasn't fated to die on the bridge (for that matter, Nathan's "accident" with Roy could've been more ambiguous, but it's not unambiguous); on the other hand, though, we don't come to Final Destinations for the damned gunfights.
Let us declare it a noble experiment, even if, in the franchise's context, Bludworth could only have intended it as an ignoble experiment, and frankly I don't know if it even fucking worked, since depending on which part of the movie's longeurs you go by, the implication as to whether it did or didn't is totally different.
But that's the even cooler twist Final Destination 5 has in store, barely even hinted at—I've alluded to every last one of the hints I've ever noticed in three viewings of the thing—which is that, oops, it's a prequel, with Sam and Molly boarding Flight 180 to Paris in the year 2000 alongside Alex and his pals, who don't die, though Sam and Molly do, Sam believing he's become safe (that the plane gets Nathan, too, even though he's not even on it, is the real chef's kiss). It's somehow both astonishingly clever and sort of meaninglessly dumb—I think if the movie didn't have Bludworth priming them to kill, you could argue the entire last third of the film was "about" 21st century 20-somethings reinventing religion up-to-and-including human sacrifice but only in a vain attempt to command Death; but he did prime them, so it's very hard to say "yes, that's my pretentious interpretation of Final Destination 5"—but when being "astonishingly clever" and "sort of meaninglessly dumb" is, after all, the Final Destination experience, it's still pretty perfect to end it on such a glorious combination of both. Of course, what goes unsaid is that, while everybody must die, IP never does.
Score: 7/10
*And co-writer of the Nightmare On Elm Street remake, but we're about forgiveness here.
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