Chadzilla ROARS!!! (The Official Blog of Chadwick H. Saxelid, Writer)

Final Destination 5 (2011)

Yet again, a young man's psychic vision of a catastrophic disaster saves a select few from certain death.  Death, once again, is not at all pleased by this wrinkle in its carefully planned design, so each and every lucky survivor suffers a horrible, ironic and torturous death.

After sitting through the bare bones and bone tired going-through-the-motions-for-a-quick-buck fourth film, The Final Destination, I really questioned whether or not I would even bother sitting through Final Destination 5.  Then the favorable reviews from the genre sites and, more importantly, a good friend of mine started to come in.  It seemed that the fifth Final Destination movie had done what The Final Destination had not.  It had spiced up the Grand Guignol in a manner that made it fun again.

The favorable reviews have, for the most part, all said that Final Destination 5 is the best movie in the series since Final Destination 2.  That is some high praise, since Final Destination 2 is considered by many, myself included, to be the most entertaining, if not the flat out best, film in the entire series.  Well, those positive reviews are correct.  Final Destination 5  is every bit as much fun as Final Destination 2.

Like the second film, Final Destination 5 goes gleefully over the top when delivering the mayhem.  The opening disaster, the collapse of a suspension bridge, is a truly breathtaking sequence that reaches operatic heights of bloody mayhem.  When the characters that are supposed to die during the bridge collapse are shown dying during the young man's vision, they get offed in shockingly over-the-top and cartoonish ways.  One woman gets impaled on the tip of a sailboat's mast.  Another survives the fall to the water, only to be crushed by a falling car.  One poor fellow gets doused with boiling tar and has his skin cooked off of his body before falling to his death.  Once again, it seems that the production hired Wilie E. Coyote, Super Genius, to act as Technical Consultant for the death dealing accidents in the film.

The over-the-top carnage that begins the film, carnage that is also, arguably, every bit the equal of the beloved highway smash up in the second film, is only a taste of what is to come.  Wilie E. Coyote, Super Genius, earns his Technical Consultant fee, for those fated to die hard in the accident are, far more often than not, fated to die even harder in the Rube Goldbergian death traps that claim them later.  As with previous entries, the movie delights more in the oh-so-slow "freak accident" setting of the traps.  The springing of said traps, more often than not, are simple punchlines to a nauseatingly funny black joke.

Of all the gags in this film, however, I think that Lucio Fulci would have loved the laser eye surgery one the best.  It had his ocular trauma adoring fingerprints all over it.

But the important thing that makes Final Destination 5 so much fun is how the film makers bothered to create real characters.  Granted many of them are not particularly likable or sympathetic, thus allowing the viewer to delight in the irony of said character's gruesome departure from this mortal plane, but the ones that are make the filler between the death scenes feel like more than just filler.

Which brings me to the cast, which is surprisingly good for this type of picture.  Although Mile Fisher is such a dead ringer for a young Tom Cruise that it became distracting.  Every time I saw him I stopped watching the movie and started wondering how long it would take for him to get cast in a movie to be the younger version of a character being played by Cruise in later or early scenes.  I loved seeing character actor Dennis Koechner again (Koechner first caught my eye as the cartoonishly foul-mouthed co-pilot in the cult flop Snakes on a Plane), but I could not keep myself from giggling every time Courtney B. Vance, playing yet another suspicious authority figure in long line of suspicious authority figures, showed up.  That is due to my recent binging on Law & Order: Criminal Intent episodes.  Every single time Vance stepped into a scene, I kept expecting to hear that doink-doink sound, or to see Detectives Goren and Eames come in right behind him.  If that had happened, then Final Destination 5 would have become the greatest crossover film of all time. 

As it is, though, it is a perfect final film for surprisingly fun franchise.  One that puts a very appropriate AC/DC song to very good use. 

Three stars out of four.  (If you're into this kind of thing, that is.)

The Final Destination (2009)

After a young man's psychic vision helps a group of spectators survive a disaster at a local racetrack, the survivors begin dying off one-by-one in a series of gruesome, not to mention increasingly ludicrous, accidents.

First off, let me state that The Final Destination is one of the absolute worst films of 2009.  It is a plotless and characterless exercise in gruesome gimmickry that only has an optical illusion to provide any depth whatsoever to its blood soaked proceedings.

Let me also say that I thoroughly enjoyed it for the complete and utter trash that it was.  To quote the late, great Gene Siskel's review of Anaconda, "How's that for film criticism?"

Two descriptive cliches could, and more than likely will, be used to defend ones enjoyment of The Final Destination to those that do not: "Popcorn Movie" and "Rollercoaster Ride."  The Final Destination is every bit as lightweight and easily digested as the former, and just as soulless and mechanical as the latter.

But there is a third descriptive cliche that I think could be used for this movie.  Pornographic.

The Final Destination is the closest I have come to seeing a movie that replicates the viewing experience of a pornographic film.  The entire viewing experiece exists to simply show the viewer the money shot.  It has no other reason for existing.  If you excised the sex from a porn film, there would be nothing left to watch. (Doonesbury did an absolutely hilarious strip illustrating that very fact when it showed a couple watching the broadcast network premiere of Debbie Does Dallas, a classic porn film, that lasted, maybe, 30 seconds.)  Likewise, if the fatal accidents were excised from The Final Destination, there would be nothing left to watch.

The Final Destination is superior to almost all porn, though, because it understands the immense pleasure to be found in foreplay.  The build-up to the big moments are just as important as the big moments themselves.  The Final Destination knows how to tease and when to deliver.  Just be ready to feel in need of a long cleansing shower when you exit the theater.

Final Destination 3 (2006)

Once again an eclectic group of soon to be graduating teens is saved from certain-to-be-gruesome-death-in-a-horrible-catastrophe by one girl's psychic vision.  But Death has a design and it refuses to be cheated.  Soon afterward, each of the survivors dies in a gruesome and rather unique accident.  They also die in the exact order in which they would, or perhaps should, have died in the catastrophe designed to take their lives.  The dwindling number of survivors struggle to find a way to understand Death's Design before it's their time to be claimed in a bloody "accident."

Final Destination 3 brought back a vivid childhood memory.  During one trip to Great America, a local amusement park (way back when it was Marriott's Great America), my dad and I waited in line to ride the Demon, a multiple loop and corkscrew ride.  I got increasingly frightened until, when we were actually on the ride, I freaked out and demanded that I be let off.  The operators were happy to do so, but my dad was a little bit angry about having had to wait in a long line, only to have his large-for-his-age son blubber like a baby and chicken out of the stupid ride.  An almost identical thing happens at the beginning of the third Final Destination.  This time I got to see exactly what my childhood self was so terrified of happening.

It also made my son swear off of riding rollercoasters for life.

Returning from the first movie, the writing/producing team of Glen Morgan and James Wong (who also directed) have, once again, taken the slasher movie framework and decorated it with the best elements of the disaster movie (you know, the actual disaster) and The Omen series (death by gruesome accident).  Instead a group of stereotypical or archetypal teens (the difference depending entirely on how well the movie works for you) getting wasted in inventive ways by some masked bogeyman of a serial killer, Final Destination has them getting killed in inventive accidents.  It seems that, if you manage to cheat Death, then the payback for doing so is far more horrible than what was originally in store.  Not the most comforting of thoughts.

The down side of Final Destination 3 is the weak story.  There isn't one.  The upside is the rather over-the-top accidents that claim victim after victim.  Morgan and Wong know that the audience is primarily showing up to see people die in over-the-top ways, so they don't waste time pretending that their movie is something it isn't.  They give the audience what it wants.  Some horrible disaster out of its collective nightmares, then a bunch of gnarly and weird worst-case-scenario accidents claiming one life after another.  The formula still pays off, despite the dramatic weakness.  In only two weeks of release, the 25 million dollar budgeted Final Destination 3 has already grossed close to 40 million dollars at the American box office.  A Final Destination 4 is pretty much a given.

The easy to see differences between the slasher movies of old and the Final Destination movies of today are the increased production values and the literalization of Death as unstoppable force.  (Rather than having some supernaturally unstoppable freak standing in for Death.)  The more subtle difference is that the Final Destination series lacks that rigid sexual morality of the old school slasher movies.  Death claims everybody at one point or another and, in the wake of real world catastrophes and senseless bloodshed (from 9/11 to Katrina to hotel bombings to tsunamis to school shootings and on and on) the existential nature of the series seems to say that avoiding death is impossible and, rather than wallow in Survivor's Guilt, enjoy what little time you have left.  Because everybody will eventually dance with the Grim Reaper.