I’m not even sure why I watched this. I hadn’t seen any of the earlier Final Destination movies, I’m not a fan of the “body count film,” and I had plenty of other things to keep me occupied.  Oh well, it wasn’t a complete waste of my time (I didn’t leave the cinema angry and frustrated), though in retrospect I’m certain I’d have been happier and more productive if I’d been otherwise occupied.

             There are some inherent problems with “body count” films.  You don’t want the likeable characters to die, you don’t care to watch the unlikeable characters before they die, the narratives are constructed as simple frameworks upon which to hang the “kills,” and then there’s the whole moral issue of gaining pleasure from watching explicit acts of violence.  The latter is compounded if the characters being killed are “innocent” and the purpose of the movie is primarily to show their deaths rather than show a killer committing crimes prior to being tracked down and brought to justice—that’s the moral difference between a crime film or a horror movie and blatant “body count” pictures (slasher films fall into a vague middle ground, depending on each movie’s focus).  These films aren’t scary, they aren’t exciting, they aren’t interesting in an intellectual way, they aren’t involving in an emotional way.

             Final Destination 5 does, to its credit, apparently have some clever connections with its predecessors.  I say “apparently,” because I didn’t get the references at all (having not watched FD 1-4) and only learned of them from the IMDB comments page after I’d seen the movie (only one of the “clues” drew attention to itself and I was slightly puzzled, but the others went over my head completely).  Otherwise, this is simply another “line ‘em up and mow ‘em down” movie, albeit a slickly-made one with abundant 3D effects. 

      The basic premise of the whole Final Destination series reminds me of 1983’s Sole Survivor, a pretty decent movie in its own right, but not one which needed 4 sequels re-hashing the same story. 8 employees of a company survive a bridge collapse because Sam has a premonition about the event.  But “Death doesn’t like to be cheated,” and members of the “Lucky 8” meet their deaths in gruesome ways.  

              One FD twist which is only briefly dealt with is the concept that each survivor can placate Death by killing someone else, after which the victim’s unused lifespan will be added to theirs.  This idea might have made for an interesting film on its own (sort of like the idea for The Box, 2009, not that that film fully explored the moral ramifications of killing people either) but is merely thrown in here. 

             The “Lucky 8” include a few mildly annoying characters (a horndog-sneak thief, a slightly bitchy young woman, and a brusque middle-manager), but I didn’t dislike any of them enough to want them to die in graphic, gory, painful ways (the middle-manager is dispatched rather quickly, but the other two suffer unpleasantly).  Not to mention the other 5 relatively likeable people in the group, and a few innocent bystanders: yep, they all die, too.  (If that’s a spoiler, this movie isn’t for you anyway).

             To be fair, the production values are adequate, the effects are satisfactory (including some which probably looked rather good in 3D, I’d wager), and the performances are professional.  It’s not the actors’ fault that their characters are under-written and the plot is skimpy.  Though again, to give the writers their due, there’s a pattern of “lurking death-traps everywhere, here it comes, no, wait, he/she is killed by something else!” (in other words, you don’t just see a giant boulder poised on a hill and then have the victim squashed by it, you see the boulder and wait and wait and then—twist!—the victim is suddenly bitten by a snake and dies), which is moderately clever.

             However, I still get the feeling I lost 92 irreplaceable minutes of my life (and killed who knows how many brain cells) watching Final Destination 5, and for what end?  Wasn’t there another film I could have seen, or something productive I could have been doing with that time?  Meh, I guess not.  Still, I feel a little…used and dirty (and not in the  good way).

             So please, the next time I consider seeing a Saw sequel, or Piranha 3D, or a Scream film, or another Final Destination, be sure to remind me of this review because…friends don’t let friends waste their time.