Watch Final Destination 5 full Megavideo Movies - Another individual experiences a vision of a grisly disaster, and cheats Death by getting him and his friends out of harm's way from a bridge collapse. Death doesn't like to be cheated and begins killing them off one by one. However, there may be a way out this time: kill someone else and take their life.
All of the films in the series were released 3 years apart. This film closes the gap and was released 2 years after the previous installment.
The first film was a clever and different slasher film by having the killer be an invisible force that can't really be stopped. The second movie in the series is bigger and better, with more elaborate (and violent) deaths and an opening highway death sequence that's one of the best depictions of carnage ever in a horror movie. Unfortunately the next two came along and they weren't great. The third film in the series was the worst one and The Final Destination, the fourth entry, wasn't much better.
Now in 2011, this series redeems itself with Final Destination 5. The team of director Steven Quale and writer Eric Heisserer have put together almost an apology to series fans for the mediocrity of the past films by giving them a Final Destination movie that brings the fun back into the series. It has all the strengths of the first two films in the series along with very few of the flaws that the last two films had. To add to that, the 3D showings present some of the best 3D in a horror film since My Bloody Valentine 3D.
The movie begins as these movies often do by introducing our characters before they get involved in some grisly disaster. This time we follow a group of young successful people all working at the same paper company, on their way to a retreat. Sam (Nicholas D'Agosto) sees a vision of the disaster that is yet to come: the bridge will collapse and there will be no survivors. After this he gets his girlfriend Molly (Emma Bell) and anyone else willing to follow off the bus. When the survivors begin dying, they soon find out Death is after them from the same spooky coroner (Tony Todd) we've seen before. He tells them that there is a way out: if you kill someone, you get their life.
There is one reason a horror fan goes to see a Final Destination film and its to see young people die in nasty ways. After some of the lackluster death sequences in the previous two films, this one is more mean-spirited and it almost gives Death a sense of humor in how he kills these people. The writers know that their audience comes to expect certain deaths so they switch them up a little bit. Without spoiling anything, the deaths you see in the trailer don't end the way you think they do. It drops hints that one thing or another will happen, but then something comes out of left field and all you can do is laugh.
In addition to playing with the audiences' expectations, this film also makes great use of the 3D. The opening credits alone feature such a variety of items (all callbacks to the previous films) flying at the screen with broken glass that one could wonder if that's all there is to it. But no, they throw even more at the screen later. If someone gets impaled, you will see the stick come at the screen with the entrails still hanging on it. If someone gets crushed, a body part will fly at the screen. These aren't spoilers...in a movie like Final Destination 5, it's just a matter of time that these things will happen.
The film also had some likable characters, the first time in a long time this has happened. They're still mostly paper-thin (except our lead) and just there as a body count, but at least they're worht watching. No character development is par for the course with a lot of the victims in this series, even if we did get a lot of time for Devon Sawa in the original. It's the character development that makes the audience care whether or not he will be able to cheat Death again. We don't learn very much about our main cast here, it's through their personalities and quirks that we find them tolerable, if not outright likable. Obviously some of them won't be on screen long enough for us to develop an opinion on, and that's okay too. You know what you're getting in these movies.
The most character development comes from Miles Fisher, who plays Peter. He's a witness to the first post-disaster death, takes it pretty hard and undergoes a change that feels pretty natural, given the state of things. It's a wonder more characters in this series don't go down that road. A twist that helps them is the new idea that if you kill someone, you get their life. It's an interesting moral dilemma...if your death is approaching soon and you could take someone else's life to keep yourself alive, would you? Some say no, some say yes. Who does what won't surprise you, but it's the ride of getting there that makes it fun.
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