In Final Destination 5, Death makes the point yet again that it will not be cheated. And happily for those of us who enjoy the FD series' grotesquely clever premise beyond reason, unfortunate folks still refuse to pay attention, with inventively dire consequences. It's been twelve years since Flight 180 exploded in the original Final Destination, way back in a pre 9/11 universe when a gaggle of high school kids meant to expire in the explosion survived instead — all because one teen with a premonition saved a handful of his classmates. Of course, as a result, those ''lucky'' survivors threw the laws of the horror-movie universe off balance. Which is why each expired, in one exotic way or another, in the months that followed. Now, a dozen years later, Death — personified by franchise stalwart andCandyman star Tony Bludworth as an excellently creepy coroner — demonstrates what happens to those who don't pay attention to cosmic rules.
Alas, it's no longer pretty, vapid teens who meet their untimely ends in this efficient, albeit mechanical edition. But at least it's a group of pretty, vapid co-workers at a paper company — a nice shout-out to The Office! — who are shafted. They're also boiled, broken, sliced, drowned, fried, burnt, crushed, and, in one instance, pierced by acupuncture needles. Sam (Nicolas D'Agosto, from Heroes) is the newest dude with a pesky premonition, this time that the bridge over which he and his coworkers are traveling on a corporate bus trip is about to collapse. Among the (temporarily) saved are Emma Bell (The Walking Dead) as Sam's ambivalent girlfriend; Miles Fisher (Gossip Girl) as Sam's coworker and best friend; and P.J.Byrne (Horrible Bosses) as the office slimeball, a guy not above rifling the desks of his already deceased coworkers for anything worth filching. For a dose of Thespian Grandeur, Courtney B. Vance joins in as an investigating agent. Just because it's always a pleasure to see him, David Koechner (fromThe Office — another shout-out!) plays the group's less-than-beloved boss. And just for the many people who enjoy watching gymnastics on TV, there's a deliciously anxiety-filled scene involving a young competitor (Ellen Wroe, in her feature debut) and a loose screw.
Under the direction of James Cameron protegé Steven Quayle, the visual effects from Ariel Velasco Shaw (who has crafted mayhem on everything from 300 to Freddy vs. Jason) ensure that no industrial hook through a skull is left unimagined. And speaking of hooks, if there's got to be a trendy-if-unnecessary 3D application, it might as well be applied to flying objects of death, whooshing with cheerfully deadly aim towards audience eyeballs.
The fifth installment of the “Final Destination” series begins with the usual 10 minutes of fun. An elaborately choreographed disaster, in this case a bridge collapse, eliminates a group of teenagers in entertainingly disgusting ways before being revealed as a premonition. This allows some of the group to avoid death, so that they can be killed again — in slower, more stomach-churning fashion — over the rest of the film.
Few horror cycles are as consistently true to their formulas, and “Final Destination 5,” directed by Steven Quale, hits all its marks: dream, escape, official suspicion, theme song (“Dust in the Wind” this time) and Tony Todd , who returns as Bludworth, the voice of cheated death, after taking the fourth movie off.
“It’s just that I’ve seen this before,” he says, a line that’s too depressingly true to be funny.
A new wrinkle in how the killings spool out actually makes the film even more predictable, and the deaths, which tend to be squirmy rather than explosive (a scene in an eye doctor’s office could be a deal breaker for some), are so perfunctory and lazily jokey that they leave a decidedly bad aftertaste.
Amid the carnage, Mr. Todd and Courtney B. Vance, as an F.B.I. agent, are fun to watch, and P. J. Byrne stands out among the young cannon fodder as an amusingly obnoxious womanizer who has an unhappy ending in a massage parlor.
“Final Destination 5” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Impalements, decapitations, burnings, crushings, laserings — in 3D if you’re lucky.
FINAL DESTINATION 5
Opens on Friday nationwide.
Directed by Steven Quale; written by Eric Heisserer, based on characters created by Jeffrey Reddick; director of photography, Brian Pearson; edited by Eric Sears; music by Brian Tyler; production design by David R. Sandefur; costumes by Jori Woodman; produced by Craig Perry and Warren Zide; released by Warner Brothers Pictures and New Line Cinema. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes.
WITH: Nicholas D’Agosto (Sam), Emma Bell (Molly), Miles Fisher (Peter Friedkin), Ellen Wroe (Candice Hooper), Jacqueline MacInnes Wood (Olivia Castle) and P. J. Byrne (Isaac).
'Final Destination' becomes a bridge too far
Death comes around again, in predictable fashion, chasing dullards -- 2 stars
 'Final Destination 5' |
"Final Destination 5," starring a million shards of glass and several interchangeably dull young actors plus a couple of good ones, continues this sick-joke franchise's focus on the downside of the machine age, with its loose screws and unreliable bolts and drippy air conditioning units and sharp, pointy extremities just waiting for a target. In 3-D!
"Final Destination 4" was in 3-D, and so is "F D 5." I'd rather see a documentary about the peaceable, versatile uses of WD-40, but you know teenagers. They wouldn't go to "WD-40: The Movie" unless it came with some "heinous kill sequences," as screenwriter Eric Heisserer calls the heinous kill sequences in "F D 5."
En route by bus to a corporate team-building exercise, the sales and administrative staffs of a paper company more indolent than Dunder Mifflin run into trouble on a suspension bridge unusually susceptible to high winds and the screenplay's need for a big opening. Seconds before the carnage, nice guy Sam (Nicholas D'Agosto, one of the good ones), who'd rather be cooking and living in Paris with girlfriend Molly (Emma Bell, the other good one, stoic even when she's freaking out) is stricken by a detailed premonition of the bridge disaster and its attendant impalings, and is therefore able to save a few lives when Fate does that voodoo that Fate does so well.
mjphillips@tribune.com
But Death, in the form of purring, whistling franchise regular Tony Todd (as Bludworth), needs his fatalities, and "F D 5" offers up the expected chain reactions of doom, often involving water and electricity. First-time feature film director Steven Quale, working from Heisserer's script, delivers the gore with impersonal efficiency as the story winds its way back to … well, that's a spoiler, I suppose. If more of the picture had the inventively grotesque payoff of the scene set at the gymnastics tryout, capped by a female character's inarguably poor dismount, we might have something to puke home about.
'Final Destination 5' -- 2 stars
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