Final Destination 5 (2011)

            If I have learnt only one thing from watching Final Destination 5 (and, so far, it has taught me little else) it is that subtitles and “3D” are a bad combination, particularly if said subtitles are in Lithuanian. However, assuming you aren’t going to watch this in a cinema in Vilnius, this is something the rest of you may have to take on trust for the time being.

            Final Destination was a work of some small amount of genius; a horror concept that had not been explored ad nauseum, allowing you to kill your entire cast of characters, then bring them back to life and kill them all over again. This is the kind of thing Hollywood producers dream about coming up with. Sadly, the series has taken a decidedly conventional downwards career progression, pausing for a brief upturn at the Mary Elizabeth Winstead-starring FD3 (I’m sure there were other people in it too, but they’re not important). Entry number five, whilst still being a watchable pile of gore, does nothing to arrest that downward trend, and I fear we cannot be far away from the Final Destination equivalent of Jason Goes to Hell.

           For a film that could have done so many interesting things with its concept, I find that I don’t need to tell you the story because it is exactly the same as the other four (and if you haven’t seen them then why the hell would you start at the fifth one? Common sense, please). Someone has a premonition of a big accident with much unlikely and graphic death, and with this foreknowledge manages to save a handful of the victims, who are them systematically (and with theatrical complexity) picked off by Death himself.

            The deaths are too silly and the 3D is distracting, but the fatal flaw with FD5 is that the depth of the characters is practically non-existent, meaning you simply don’t care too much about whether their innards stay inwards or not, and that has a serious effect on how much tension you feel as they inch ever closer to their elaborate doom. It’s paper thin stuff, just an excuse to be violent, but did we really expect anything else?

            I enjoyed Final Destination 5, in the same way that I enjoyed Halloween 5 and Saw 5, and I would even say that FD5 is better than those other two 5s… but it is what it is, and what it is is a throwaway piece of opiate for the base pleasure receptors. Fun but unfulfilling, and a bit of a waste when you consider what they could be doing with this series.

**/*****