Final Destination 5 (2011)

A federal agent in the movie points out that one or two deaths is just a coincidence, but that three all right in a row means something's going on. One or two, or even three, movies that use the exact formula can be acceptable. Four was pushing it. Five is just crazy. I can give Final Destination 5 just a little bit of credit for mixing it up a bit. The big multi-fatality disaster that opens every film usually involves a group of people sitting in a certain order in a certain area and then they are all killed in that order. That way when it is revealed that that was all just a vision, and then in real life the people start dying off in the order they died in the dream, it's easy to keep track of them. In 5, we are introduced to the doomed characters who all get on a bus in the traditional order: the jerks we love to boo in front, then the attractive people, and then the nice couple. The twist being that everybody gets out of the bus and starts running around and dying in a completely random order. Keeping up with the new format isn't as easy. That's as original as it gets.

There's this terrible scene that depicts the expected group funeral. The movie briefly pretends through this section that it cares about the people who died. It wants to think it has a soul underneath all the gore, but it doesn't. That's why the extended conversations between the couple about how much they'd do for each other and so on don't mean anything. We know they're going to die, so why waste time on the crap? I wouldn't mind if it all wasn't so phony. That brings me to the hook of the movie which is the complicated and teasing manner in which each of the deaths are presented. They aren't scary or thrilling or very disturbing. They are comical, and I don't mean because they're cheesy. They are actually supposed to make you laugh. When a girl's face is all cut up by a laser eye surgery gone wrong and she falls out of a window to her actual death, her eye falls out and is separately squashed by a car. That's just mean-spirited. And everything about each similar scene in the movie is just plain sadistic. After the movie, before the credits, there's a montage of various graphic deaths from the other movies set to a rock song. When does this stuff become bad taste? If a horror movie is disturbing, there is at least a degree of condemnation on screen, as well as real purpose. This movie is messed up because it sets out to entertain instead of disturb.

Ignoring Final Destination 5's problems in content, there is a big lack of anything surprising or even interesting going on for this movie. Just some same old, same old here. That goes for the 3-D as well, which everyone knows has been getting overuse in the movies today, but its use in this movie is gimmicky and silly. I felt particularly annoyed during the very long opening credits sequence that is simply a series of dangerous objects being flung at the screen over and over again. This whole movie's kind of like that. It's just the same grisly accidents thrown at the viewer over and over again.

4/10