Final Destination 5 (2011)

R, and this one is almost exclusively for gore.  Maybe it was an attempt to class it up just a little bit from what I consider the trashiest entry (The Final Destination), but this one seemed somehow more about the scares rather than the exploitation.  That being said, one of the survivors in this one is a sleeze.  That's his entire personality: sleeze.  So he's going to tell some raunchy jokes.  But the thing that is most upsetting is that we're back to the old gross visual effects when it comes to the accidents once more.

DIRECTOR: Steven Quale

They did it!  They Nostradamused my blog and knew what I hated so much about the last entry and course corrected entirely, leaving me with the best entry in the franchise...so far.  I mean, I hear glorious things about the final entry in the series, which is the next Final Destination movie that I have to get through.  So, you know, I'm not in a bad place.

But I have to tell you, this feels like it was meant to be the last entry in the franchise.  I love confessing stupid things on this blog, so I'll announce freely and without reservation that I skimmed the Wikipedia page.  The word "skimmed" is doing some heavy lifting there because there's a very good chance that I missed the piece of information that I was looking for.  I checked Wikipedia exclusively for an announcement that this as meant to be the last entry in the franchise.  Instead, I found out that the last one, The Final Destination, was meant to be the last one.  Instead, the people behind these movies rushed Final Destination 5 into production.  The other entries in the series are spread three years apart while the distance between The Final Destination and Final Destination 5 are only two years apart.  For a movie that isn't supposed to exist, I find it fascinating that, somehow, Final Destination 5 came out with such a level of class that I was taken aback.

I mean, I want to jump right to the big reveal.  The big reveal was icing on the cake for me.  I was watching this film honestly enjoying it and holding it as the standard for the franchise.  I'll try to talk about that later.  But the reveal is such a beautiful send up of the series as a whole.  Making the film a secret prequel to the first film is honestly a level of genius that I wasn't quite ready for.  I don't know if it works in terms of aesthetics.  The only real hint that you get for this secretly being a prequel is Isaac's phone and the VHS tape on the bus.  These are two things that almost feel like they were put there for the viewer watching this film in 2025 versus someone watching it in 2011.  Of course in 2025 did I assume that people were still using Motorola Razrs and VHS were more commonplace.  I have to remember that my wife bought me my first iPhone when we started dating in 2009.  It's that level of attention that I should have been holding onto when watching the film.  But there's something a little special about dismounting on this idea.  The funny things about prequels is that you often have your hands tied into what you are allowed to do with storytelling.  After all, you can't undo the events or specialness of the original film.  And the sequels to Final Destination seem to treat the Paris Flight 180 as this watershed moment for how death deals with being cheated, so you can't have this bridge accident be the center of attention.  But none of it feels like it is beholden to the original film --yet all the puzzle pieces work!  It's honestly rock-solid storytelling in a franchise that often does not care about story.

We were obsessed with The Office in 2011, right?  I mean, there had to be someone in the production department who was obsessed with this show during the making of this film.  While I do think that this movie is perhaps the pinnacle of the franchise so far, it does feel like the movie is going out of their way to put things in this Dunder Mifflin style location and have the bully factory worker named Roy while Todd Packer shows up as the boss of this place.  There's, like, a billion little things about this that seem to be a send-up to that show.  But even more than that, the story doesn't really need the office so much as it needs the location so Roy can die by hook to the jaw.  It's really weird that everyone in this office environment holds two jobs.  Perhaps it's the go-getterness of 2011 --an era that infamously lambasted millennials as lazy --to have every character have two jobs.  I mean, from a Final Destination screenwriter's perspective, two jobs means two locations with different horrors that could occur.  (Also, I don't think that the gymnast death could look like that.  It was a bit much.) But it is kind of fun having The Office dynamic while creating a movie that absolutely had nothing to do with The Office.

But the thing that absolutely made me love it is an embracing of the thesis.  I've been writing these things for the month.  I have now watched the majority of the Final Destination films and, for the most part, no regrets.  They are fun movies, if they are lacking a little bit on the nutrition of film.  But I always theorized that the Final Destination movies should have been a home for special effects dorks to have free rein over making a movie that highlights gory deaths.  Now, Parts One through Three absolutely lived up to that edict.  But Final Destination 5 completely crushed that.  It is a movie that not only has good special effects (for the most part), but also the film looks great.  I know.  A lot of this is that color grading that movies in the 2010s absolutely loved.  But it also gave the film a sense of not just being a throwaway entry in a long running series.  I can't stress how dumb this franchise is.  Dumb is not a bad thing, in cases of Final Destination movies.  These are movies made for the sake of making movies.  But do you understand how much better a movie feels when it seems like the director kind of cares.  Like, he shot the movie well.  He made us like and dislike characters and that's something that I don't want to necessarily ignore or downplay.  

God bless Final Destination 5 for picking up a thread from Final Destination 3 that I felt was overlooked.  One of the things that I thought Final Destination needed as a franchise was the notion that there needed to be a bad guy to rally against.  One thing that was getting increasingly muddy was the effect of free will against fate.  It's a central concept (in, if I may repeat myself, what is an incredibly dumb premise) that keeps kind of stepping on its own toes.  Sometimes, free will is the bringer of respite. Sometimes, it's all part of death's plan. It's a mess, if I may be honest.  But when you make a character have a reason to start murdering other characters, that makes the story have some kind of investment in motivation.  Now, I'm not going to say that Final Destination 5 is brilliant in terms of choices going into these movies.  After all, Peter choosing Molly as his target really makes you do some mental backflips to figure out his motives.  He says that he can't kill some stranger because they've done nothing to deserve it.  But Peter believes that Sam saving Molly in both realities makes her undeserving of life?  I mean, I don't quite get it.  It almost feels like Peter is arbitrarily mad at Sam for giving him a second chance at life.  Whatever.  They wanted the story to have some personal stakes and I get the desire to make that happen in this story.  

But this also leads to a weird retcon.  Don't get me wrong.  Final Destination 5 absolutely made the right choice in changing the rules of death.  One thing that completely frustrated me about Final Destination 2 was the fact that Death's plan could only be overwritten with new life. That seems like Death would get more mad about that.  (I also love that I know that Final Destination 2, while being canonical, even going as far as to show the logging truck in Final Destination 5, is ignoring its own rules.)  But I love that Death would be satiated with one of the survivors swapping lives with someone else.  That Nathan epiphany when we find out that Roy was dying of cancer is pretty fantastic.  Silly, but fantastic.  I champion this retcon because it makes Death a character that is oddly spiteful.  I mean, think about it.  One of the things that always kind of bothers me about this series is the idea that these people have to die by some kind of Rube Goldberg killing accident.  Death could easily just give people some kind of aneurysm and that would be in line with Death's master plan.  But making these deaths horrific every single time means that Death's kind of spiteful.  That's why I've been capitalizing the first letter in death because this is a personality attacking each of these surivors in the most salty way possible.  So the notion that Death would get a kick on these guys turning on each other.

It also gives Tony Todd's character a closer tie to Death.  I always treated Mr. Bludworth as some kind of old soul, like Guinan on Star Trek: The Next Generation, who had insight into the things that mere mortals could not understand.  Maybe he was a little imp or something or a medium who had insight into the afterlife.  Nope.  I'm saying now that Tony Todd's Bludworth might be Death himself.  It would explain the changing of the rules.  It's how Death is feeling in the moment.  And with the case of Final Destination 5, instead of having simply the one visit by the survivors looking into what is happening, Bludworth is stalking them at every death.  Yeah, yeah, he's a coroner.  Of course he'd be picking up these bodies as he goes along.  But there's almost something gleeful at seeing these kids being manipulated into their respective scenarios.

Would I like this movie as much if I hadn't just watched the nadir of the series, The Final Destination?  Maybe not.  But after seeing a movie that straight up bothered me, Final Destination 5 comes across as a breath of fresh air.  The movie works all around.  It's still fun, but it's also filmed with a sense of respect that I hadn't seen coming.  I hope I can knock out two more movies before Friday.  It's going to be tight, but I think that I can do it.  Maybe.  I don't know.