(Two Stars)
U.S.: Steven Quale, 2011

In Final Destination 5, as in the other Final Destinations, blood is the money shot, the actors, or at least their characters, are expendable , and a guy named Bludworth, or his boss Destiny, is breaking up that old gang of mine (again).
 
For only the price of a movie ticket (and refreshments, which you may want to skip), you get to see in this movie, a half dozen or so personable young actors and actresses hideously killed in highly imaginative ways. People are bashed to death, sliced in two, pursued with cleavers, lasered to death, blown out of planes and dropped off a disintegrating suspension bridge — and each time, the sequence is carefully planned, ingeniously set up, and meticulously executed. There’s no denying that Final 5, directed by Steven Quale, James Cameron’s second unit director on Avatar, is well-made, and it may well be the best of this tawdry series, as some say, though I haven’t seen enough of them to judge. (Just the last one, which was awful.)
 
And it didn’t really help that, in this movie, the death scenes were done with such unusual care and such obvious technical skill, edited so crisply, shot so well.
 
As in the previous four entries in this popular horror movie series, a young character experiences a premonition of death (usually in a plane or vehicle about to crash, here on a suspension bridge about to collapse). They wake up to avert the catastrophe, and help others escape — but then they all find themselves the targets of a malicious destiny (represented here as previously, by actor Tony “Candyman“ Todd playing a coroner named Bludworth). Death apparently feels it was robbed, and that the inappropriately alive survivors must be rubbed out in a series in a series of seemingly spontaneous “accidents.” There’s one new wrinkle: You can avoid death a second time if you kill somebody to take your place.)
 
That’s the main appeal and marketing hook of the movie: those ingeniously staged accidents that look like Rube Goldberg inventions in reverse, or like the torture murders of Saw, rescripted by a second, more finicky maniac, as if they were part of some evil mechanism of fate. And they include gory, painstakingly staged scenes of a beautiful young gymnast jumping on a gym-horse, on which a screw has been dropped (that and the bridge collapse are the movie’s showpiece sequences); a lecherous schmoo named Isaac (P.J. Byrne) going for an oriental massage and acupuncture session that turn nasty; and (my nomination for the movie’s low point), the eye-opening fate of bespectacled, leggy Olivia Castle (Jacqueline MacInnes Wood), who has laser corrective eye surgery, during which, outrageously the ophthalmologist walks off while the laser is running and just as it’s about to go berserk.
 
None of these actors are bad or mediocre, but none of them are really very good (here) either, not even Byrne who tries hard to find some comedy and ham it up for us. And though Quale shows off real, flashy technical expertise in his series of bloody set-pieces, it gave me no pleasure to watch them. Nor did I feel any suspense, because according to the rules of the Final Destination game, there’s no way that any of the main characters (those who were spared in one accident to die in others) can survive. You know they’re goners almost from the moment you first see them, or at least if you’ve ever seen another Final Destination. Nor is there any explanation of why there’s been no investigation into this mysteriously recurring phenomenon, or why this stuff keeps happening — other than the fact that it’s time for another sequel.
 
You think I’m being a grouch. But, by now, I estimate I must have seen 10,000 or more kids in horror movies getting mangled and killed (if I didn’t, it felt like it), some imaginatively, some unimaginatively. I’m sick of it. What good does it do to see a well-made movie, if what they’re making annoys the hell out of you?
　
That’s how I felt about Final Destination 5. And it didn’t really help that, in this movie, the death scenes were done with such unusual care and such obvious technical skill, edited so crisply, shot so well. I guess I would have liked the movie more if the non-carnage dramatic scenes in between the slaughter were better done, but they were vapidly written and indifferently or pushily acted. It’s clear that those scenes, which were admittedly better than their equivalents in some other horror movies, including some previous Finals, weren‘t regarded as important, just drama stuff — which is a common failing of today’s horror movies.
 
How can you blame the writer, who was just churning out the bloody business as usual? How can you blamed the director, who was engaged to stage torture with pizzazz? How can you blame the actors — who know they were hired to get ripped apart?
 
The big question: Why do so many teenagers and twenty-somethings love to see movies, even badly made movies, where a bunch of young people — all young, all attractive, except for an occasional goofball — are slashed, bashed and bloodily massacred one by screaming one, by either a psycho serial killer, some kind of fiendish monster or zombie, or here, by the not-so-fickle, relentless finger of fate? I just don’t know. But believe me, a lot of Hollywood is looking for the formula — and their patron saint may be a maniac swinging a marketing hook.
 
   Oh year, the movie was in 3D. See it in 2D.

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