Final Destination 5: A Mildly Pleasant Surprise

Final Destination 5 is a movie that, while unremarkable when compared to other, unrelated titles, is also part of a media franchise so starved for basic competencies that it can't help but stand out from its predecessors. It may be more or less the same thing as before, just kick-started by a wrongful escape from a pivotal bridge collapse instead of a doomed airplane flight or a fateful roller coaster accident. Still, it does everything its predecessors do, and it does it a partial letter grade better than they did.

The most immediately apparent thing about the fifth Final Destination is that it looks perceptibly better than any of the movies preceding it. The crisp digital cinematography of this movie, while by no means something that will or even should be taught in a film class, gives it a leg up on its predecessors in somewhat surface-level yet undeniably relevant ways. Subtext-wise, this episode is also more subtle than any of the movies before it, some well-placed and surprising uses of visual, show-don't-tell cues being the finest example of this delicacy. Best of all, Final Destination 5 is more introspective and meditative than any of the movies preceding it, willing to engage with the deeper parts of its characters in ways that feel refreshingly raw and honest.

We're familiar with how this franchise operates now, as evidenced by the fact that none of us drives behind log trucks on the interstate anymore. This movie knows that we know how it works, or at least that we know how it doesn't work. In many ways, its refusal to explain with true precision why any of the bizarre deaths in it are happening at all remains annoying, but on the level of the characters, its insistence on digging even marginally deeper into their emotions is refreshing. A character who has some semblance of humanity to latch onto makes the existential dread of seeing numerous small things in the world around them go wrong, while they themselves don't, that much more grueling to watch.

There are also some smart, subtly funny editing choices in Final Destination 5 that made a really good impression on me. This movie is surprising, both as a vessel of dark humor and simply as a story, sometimes pleasantly surprising. However, not everything about it works; not even close. In a lot of ways, it's strange that so many of this movie's moving parts work as well as they do, because it lacks a heart. Even if the characters in this movie have an emotional leg up on those in other Final Destination movies, they lack any truly exciting traits when compared to characters from almost any other franchise. Very few of the characters in this movie possess even a mere personality to call their own, and while I've gotten somewhat used to it after five of these things, this episode doesn't scrounge up any super-compelling reason for us to keep watching to find out anything beyond how these almost-characters meet their end. While it improves on many of the now-familiar moving parts of the franchise, it doesn't escape the sins of its forefathers, not by a long shot.

Nevertheless, one thing I really like about Final Destination 5 is the interesting ways it overturns many of the familiar tropes of the franchise, functioning first as a series of expectations, and second as a fun and satisfying lineup of surprises and subversions. While not even coming close to being a masterpiece, it is easily the best movie in the series thus far, partly due to its admirable willingness to take some risks. The other part of what made it the best Final Destination movie yet was its surprisingly comprehensive assembly of the fragmented pieces of the franchise's mythology. One of the most significant issues I have had with this series in the past is its stubborn refusal to explain anything about itself. However, Final Destination 5 sets itself up as the connective tissue between the other movies, and for the first time, it also made me think that it was finally poised to explain itself. This movie is no masterpiece, not by a long shot, and it has some serious issues on the most fundamental levels that a movie can. However, I admired its good-faith effort to make this franchise make sense, or at least make more sense than it's made up to this point.

Maybe it's a bad thing that a movie stands out for being mediocre. Nevertheless, Final Destination 5 is an improvement, even if it is limited by the less desirable elements and tropes of a franchise that seems to be just as good at creating thematic glass ceilings as it is at coming up with new and inventive ways of killing teenagers.

Final Destination 5 - 6/10

Hebrews 6:10-12