Final Destination 5

Posted May 25, 2012 by Speed - 0 comments

Sam Lawton and several of his colleagues are on a bus, on their way to a team-building session organised by their company, when Sam suddenly gets a vision that the bridge they’re about to cross collapses and kills them all.

After the vision, a completely upset Sam manages to get several of his friends off the bus and into safety before the collapse happens, but that’s not really what was supposed to happen. As Death doesn’t like to be cheated, all they’ve managed to do is buy some additional time before the Grim Reaper gets them after all. Or do they find a way to escape Death again?

Sound and Vision:
In 2D, Final Destination 5 looks pretty good with sharp images and plenty of detail, excellent contrast levels, strong shadow delineation and exceptional blacks that even have noticeable gradations in the grayscale. Compared to part 4 (The Final Destination) though, the 3D effects don’t come over as well in 2D except for in the intor sequence.

We get a 5.1 DTS soundtrack that again shows off during the action scenes, but the quieter moments are almost empty which is a shame. During such moments we do get some atmospherics in the distance, but the lack of activity shows also here that the attention to detail in this movie wasn’t as high as with previous iterations in the series.

Extras:
– Alternative Death scenes
– Visual effects of death
– Final Destination 5: Circle of Death

The extras too are a bit thin. The alternate death scenes are quite bad, the visual effects extra contains two before and after comparison featurettes without any commentary or text, and the Circle of Death feature is six minutes of interviews on where this part fits in the series, something you can come up with yourself after watching the movie.

Conclusion:
With part 4, we thought we had seen the Final Destination, but that was without counting the moneygrabbers in Hollywood and as such we now have Final Destination 5, a new sequel that shows there’s nothing left to tell in this series.

FD5 is worse than part 3 and proves that as numbers go up in movie series, the quality usually goes down equally, if not exponentially. This time we get bridge collapse, a Tom Cruise lookalike (Miles Fisher), and a brief appearance from Tony Todd that are supposed to keep us interested but as you can imagine this fails miserably.

The big event usually is very spectacular, but although the bridge collapse may be difficult in terms of filming, it doesn’t quite match up to the spectacle from the previous movies. The deaths themselves then lack any feeling of tension and creativity and don’t resemble the way the people were supposed to be killed (which was one of the main points in previous movies). The “story” that’s supposed to keep things together next to the ways people get killed is set up on a love interest and a detective who doesn’t believe in coincidence. Needless to say that neither adds anything to the movie. Nor does the idea that killing someone to exchange your upcoming death for their remaining years of life.

The cast of cannon fodder this time doesn’t even match the usual level of “bold and beautiful” as there’s little beauty to be seen, and the cast definitely aren’t selected for their acting skills either. This truly makes me wonder what the makers had in mind when creating this movie other than cashing in on the Final Destination name.

The ONLY good thing in this film is in the ending: it goes full circle back to the very first episode, suggesting we’ll truly not see another FD being released. Thanks for that!

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