Final Destination 5 (2011)

I was under the impression that The Final Destination was to be the last film in the franchise. How naive of me. The first four films in the series made over half a billion dollars from a combined budget of just one hundred and seventy-three million dollars. Why on Earth would they stop after just four films!

The problem facing the series is the same problem that the makers of Friday the 13th faced - you can only make so many films about Jason going around killing people before even the hardcore fans become disillusioned. What did they do after three films of stalk-kill-repeat ad nauseum? They killed Jason. Then they had a copy-cat Jason. Then they had zombie Jason. Then they had Jason vs Carrie and so on. But how can the Final Destination films do anything like that? The killer is death. Not a physical manifestation of death that the characters can challenge to a chess game but the disembodied, immaterial, "force" of death. Well, for a start, they can change the characters. Instead of a film full of teenagers, the characters are adults with jobs, spouses and career ambitions. Is that enough to stop the series from becoming stale and boring?

Yes. The characters are more fleshed out, more sympathetic, more... interesting. The cheap laughs are gone but the death scenes are better than ever. I don't think I'll ever be able to watch gymnastics at the Olympics again and I've always had the idea that at some point I'll get laser eye surgery. Yeah, not so much now. As with the rest of the films in the series, it begins with a premonition of a catastrophe, and this catastrophe is the best since the motorway pile-up of Final Destination 2. It's utterly brilliant and totally believable, a marvel of CGI and expertly directed. I haven't seen it in 3D, but from what I've read, the 3D actually enhances the effect, rather than being an annoying after-thought. The death scenes, as mentioned, are better than ever with some innovative twists and downright shocking ways for the characters to come to a sticky end. The demise of a particularly odious character during an acupuncture session provides perhaps the best thrill of all.

Tony Todd's return as William Bludworth is a welcome one and with him having signed up for Final Destination parts 6 and 7, it will be interesting to see if the creators take the series in a different direction or if they waste the opportunity. The ending is an excellent way to link the film to the preceding instalments and create new avenues for the series to explore.

In conclusion, Final Destination 5 is a much better film than I had anticipated. It's formulaic, but a spectacular disaster scene, effective characterisation and fresh and bloody deaths combine to make a worthy entry in the series.

7 out of 10.