Despite the fact that The Final Destination is widely considered to be the weakest entry in the Final Destination franchise, it was also the most financially successful entry thanks to it being the first movie in the series to be released with the 3-D gimmick. It was so successful, New Line Cinema decided to break the "new Final Destination movie every three years" pattern and get another sequel into theatres just two years after The Final Destination. That worked out for them, because Final Destination 5 - which was also released in 3-D - became the second highest grossing entry in the film. And somehow it managed to do that even though some viewers gave up on the franchise after The Final Destination. I have seen way too many people say they never got around to watching 5 because the fourth film was a disappointment, which is a shame, because Final Destination 5 is one of the best films in the series.
The first and third Final Destination movies came from the creative team of James Wong and Glen Morgan (with Jeffrey Reddick writing the initial screenplay for part 1), and the second and fourth films were both directed by David R. Ellis, working from screenplays Eric Bress worked on. (Bress received sole writing credit on The Final Destination, but shared the writing credit with Reddick and J. Mackye Gruber on Final Destination 2). It was interesting to watch filmmakers take turns on a franchise like that, but by the time credits were rolling on The Final Destination it had been made clear that the series really needed to bring in some new blood if there were to be any further installments. Thankfully, that's exactly what happened.
Steven Quale, straight off of serving as James Cameron's second unit director on Avatar (so he had experience filming in 3-D), was hired to direct Final Destination 5, while an up-and-coming screenwriter named Eric Heisserer, who would end up earning an Academy Award nomination just a few years later, was chosen to write the script. This change behind the scenes was extremely beneficial. While The Final Destination felt like it was just going through the motions, Final Destination 5 feels fresh and revitalized, and the script was a whole lot better this time around.
The characters at the center of the story are a bunch of people who work for the Presage paper company - and I have always wondered if the paper company element was a nod to the sitcom The Office, because not a lot of stories deal with people who work at paper companies. We're introduced to these characters as they're about to get on a bus together and head off on a team-building retreat, exactly the sort of goofy scenario you'd see on an episode of The Office. But they never reach their destination. On the way, the bus has to cross a large suspension bridge (North Bay Bridge in the film, Vancouver's Lions Gate Bridge in our reality) that a road construction crew is working on. While the bus is on the bridge, the whole thing crumbles - and everyone on the bus dies in horrific ways. This is a great sequence; I wouldn't rank it as highly as the original shock of Final Destination's plane explosion and nothing can live up to the highway pile-up in Final Destination 2, but I think it's an improvement over the rollercoaster crash in Final Destination 3 and The Final Destination's poorly executed racetrack disaster.
Of course, if you're familiar with Final Destination movies you won't be surprised to see that a lot of the Presage employees don't really die on the bridge. The deaths we see are a premonition being had by Presage employee and bus passenger Sam Lawton (Nicholas D'Agosto), who we know is lousy at his paper company job but might have a career as a chef. Thanks to this vision, Sam is able to save the lives of several of the other passengers. The bridge still crumbles, but they're not all on it when it does. While we do lose some extras, the characters we've met make it out of the situation alive.
Problem is, the people who got off the bus and survived the bridge collapse really were meant to die. Now Death - that invisible force that's all around us at all times - has to clean up this mess. One by one, Death goes after Sam and his co-workers: his girlfriend Molly Harper (Emma Bell), who was breaking up with him right before they got on the bus; his friend Nathan Sears (Arlen Escarpeta), the assistant plant manager; his boss Peter Friedkin (Miles Fisher), who would probably fire him if they weren't friends; Peter's college gymnast girlfriend Candice Hooper (Ellen Wroe), who is also his intern; Olivia Castle (Jacqueline MacInnes Wood), who is not a fan of having to wear her glasses; sleazy horndog Isaac Palmer (P.J. Byrne); and "big boss" Dennis Lapman (David Koechner, who was on multiple episodes of The Office).
The great joy of watching the Final Destination movies comes from seeing how Death is going to manipulate the environment around characters to cause their deaths in normal situations. How can gymnastics practice, or a visit to a massage parlor, or a lazer corrective eye procedure turn deadly? Death will keep you guessing, and there are some classic, suspenseful, painful, entertaining death sequences in this film.
Tony Todd had appeared in the first two Final Destinations as William Bludworth, a mortician who seemed to know something about what was going on, to have some familiarity with Death's design. Todd was only given a vocal cameo in the third film, and he was left out of the fourth completely - so 5 makes up for that, bringing Todd back as Bludworth, who also works as a coroner. Bludworth is at the funeral service for the victims of the bridge disaster to warn the survivors that Death doesn't like to be cheated. Instead of having the characters figure out Death's design through news articles and internet searches, like in previous films, Quale and Heisserer have Bludworth deliver that exposition to them, and Todd does it very well.
Bludworth also adds something to the mythology that we hadn't heard before. He suggests that if someone who was meant to die takes the life of someone else who is meant to be alive, it basically works as a sacrifice: the other person will take their place in Death's design, and they will be given the amount of time the other person had left to live. It's an interesting idea, and allows one of the survivors to become a human villain within the story because he takes Bludworth's suggestion very seriously. The "killed or be killed" aspect has a really clever payoff in the long run, it's a classic example of the Final Destination franchise's dark humor.
This film also rather clearly states that Bludworth himself isn't a supernatural force, he's only a person who has seen this happen from time to time. As he says, he doesn't make the rules, as a coroner / mortician he just cleans up after the game is over. This was a relief to me, because I never went along with the fans who thought it should be revealed that Bludworth was some kind of supernatural being. That would have taken things too far for my liking, the only supernatural force I want in this series is Death as we have seen it presented in these five films.
Final Destination 5 builds up to a genius ending that boosts a film that had already been a great Final Destination to an even higher level, and then it cuts from that awesomeness to a montage of death scenes from all five films, set to the AC/DC song "If You Want Blood (You've Got It)". That was really cool to see on the big screen in 3-D when the movie was first released, and it's a montage I still enjoy watching from time to time, whether it's at the end of this movie after I've sat through it all again, or if I just pull up the montage itself on YouTube. It's fun, like this whole franchise is, and it's that sense of fun that makes Final Destination my favorite horror franchise to come along since the 1980s.
Another video that's fun to look up on YouTube is the music video for cast member Miles Fisher's song "New Romance". It blends the Death's design shenanigans of Final Destination with a tribute to the TV show Saved by the Bell, featuring Final Destination 5 cast members as characters in the world of Saved by the Bell who get knocked off in bloody ways.
It has now been ten years since the release of Final Destination 5 and we still haven't gotten another sequel. That's ridiculous, we should never have gone ten years without a new Final Destination, and I really hope New Line Cinema will be fixing this mistake very soon. A new film was recently announced, and I need it to keep moving forward into production. I need more Final Destination.
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