With the sixth movie belatedly arriving in cinemas this weekend (read our preview review here), Alasdair Stuart dances with Death as he relives the original quartet of tales…

Final Destination (2000)

Alex Browning (Devon Sawa) is a high school student on a school trip to Paris. He has a terrifying premonition of the plane exploding, panics and is thrown off the flight along with a handful of other students and a teacher. They think Alex is having a psychotic episode, until the plane explodes…

The original is still one of the best movies in the series, 25 years later. That’s down to the sharp-fanged Heath Robinson-style deaths of the characters, the physicality of the effects, their emotional weight and how much they clearly hurt. Kristen Cloke’s Valerie Lewton especially has a death scene that starts with a gas hob and finishes with her entire kitchen trying to kill her and succeeding that makes you wince. This isn’t just Death, this is Death finding joy in their work.

That Wile E.Coyote style glee is contrasted with a pleasing urgency and earnestness. There’s none of the Scream movies’ nudge nudge wink wink fourth wall breaking except for when razor sharp pieces of the fourth wall take someone’s head off. It plays far more as a B-movie, complete with the main characters frantically trying to do the survival maths of how to make it and almost succeeding. It’s a great cast too. Devon Sawa, Ali Larter, Kerr Smith and Kristen Cloke would all go on to bigger things and character actor stalwart Daniel Roebuck is big fun as one of the Feds investigating Alex. Come for the retro charm, stay for one of Tony Todd’s iconic roles as mortician William Bludworth and the sequence where Alex is directly talking to death in his almost-death-proof cabin.

Final Destination 2 (2003)

En route to the Daytona racetrack, Kimberly Corman (A.J.Cook) has a premonition of a terrifying motorway pile up. She stalls on the on ramp to Route 23, inadvertently saving multiple motorists’ lives. Along with state trooper Thomas Burke (Michael Landes), she begins investigating what happened and discovers the story of Alex and Flight 180, and its sole survivor…

This is the movie everyone remembers from the franchise. The motorway pileup, that starts with a logging truck shedding its load at high speed, is so iconic and joyously horrific that I still wince every time I see a logging truck on the road. It also benefits from being a sequel, in that the mystery has a little context and is revealed to be a clever continuation of the first movie. There’s a more measured sense of doom too, and that leads to the franchise really starting to be in its approach to Death as a patient hunter with a wicked sense of humour.

It’s another great cast too. Sarah Carter, who’d go on to start in Smallville, Falling Skies, and countless other shows has a brief, fun role. Michael Landes is great too as Burke, giving the character an earnest and square-jawed charm you can see in his other TV work. David Paetku’s fun too in a small role and would go on to star most notably in excellent Canadian procedural Flashpoint. Also watch out for Noel Fisher, future Shameless and Castle Rock alumni and voice of Klarion the Witch Boy in Justice League Action in a pivotal cameo.

But this is A.J. Cook’s movie and she’s one of the two best protagonists the franchise has. The future Criminal Minds star has a grounded, urgent sense to her which makes the wackier elements of the premise land all the harder. Highlights include the moment the characters realise how they’re all connected to the first movie and the gleefully horrible opening crash.

Final Destination 3 (2006)

Wendy Christensen (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) visits an amusement park with boyfriend Jason, best friend Carrie and Carrie’s boyfriend Kevin Fischer. She has a premonition of the rollercoaster they’re on crashing, steps off and finds herself and the other survivors fighting for their lives.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead joins A.J. Cook as the series’ most fun protagonist. Wendy has a hint of Veronica Mars to her, and her dogged search for the truth gives the series a couple of enormously fun wrinkles. Wendy’s photos from the night contain hints at how the survivors will be killed and that turns the movie into a sort of pre-emptive serial killer thriller where the victims and killer are hunting each other. There’s a fun musical refrain too, as a particular song plays every time Death makes a play for someone and Death has all the fun this time around. The rollercoaster collapse is incredibly nasty, and there’s a tanning bed murder here that’s the series at its OTT best. The one weak spot is the cast. Ryan Merriman’s Kevin is fun in the same way Burke is in the second movie, but he doesn’t get as much to do. Likewise Kris Lemche is great as a goth/proto incel who becomes an interesting antagonist far too late.

Nonetheless this is a fun time. The rollercoaster sequence and the entire ending are great and there’s a delicious piece of meta humour with Tony Todd’s Bludworth. The character’s humanity is always something the series plays lightly with and while he’s not here in person, Todd voices two roles. A demonic fairground ride and a subway conductor, both closely associated with some of the movie’s nastiest sequences…

The Final Destination (2009)

College student Nck O’Bannon (Bobby Campo) is watching a motor race with his friends Hunt Wynorski (Nick Zano), Janet Cunningham (Haley Webb) and girlfriend Lori Milligan (Shantel VanSanten). He gets a premonition of disaster, they leave, it happens, and they survive and Death takes it personally.

It’s never a good sign when an 82-minute movie drags. This is the least interesting the series has ever been, and a big part of it that comes down to practical choices. A near miss on 3D in the last movie a direct hit this time around and by itself that would be fine. But the 3D is mixed with some very dated CGI that means the deaths have almost none of the physical weight of the previous movies. That’s made worse by a script which sprints along, rarely giving characters to react to the events they’re caught up in.

It’s also got the flattest, least interesting cast of the series to date. Campo, VanSanten, Webb and Zano are all capable of so much more, as VanSanten’s work on For All Mankind and Zano’s on Legends of Tomorrow show. But here they’re just asked to hit their marks and die on time. The rest of the cast fare little better especially the always excellent Mykelti Williamson who gets almost nothing to do here besides a sequence that, if you wanted to, could be viewed as a profoundly tone deaf lynching joke.

There’s none of the spark of any of the previous movies and the third act buries a very fun riff on the subject matter under a pile of unnecessary and forced 3D jokes. Lifeless, weirdly mean spirited and a waste of the talent involved.

Final Destination 5 (2011)

Sam Lawton (Nicholas D’Agosto) is a great chef, a good boyfriend and an okay employee.  He has a vision of a bridge collapse, saves the lives of his colleagues and not-quite ex Molly (Emma Bell) and the game begins again…

Written by future Arrival scribe Eric Heisserer this is mostly a return to form. Heisserer drops some welcome black comedy and a witty, playful sense to the movie’s best moments. A cheeky moment focusing on a familiar logging truck is fun, but the bridge collapse is a neatly handled, increasingly chaotic nightmare that spirals out into an enormous event. On the other end of the spectrum, the extended, mischievously malicious death of office sex pest Isaac Palmer (P.J. Byrne) is the highlight. Never make fat jokes, especially about Buddha. An early gymnastic related death too is full of darkly funny fake outs and a truly horrifying dismount. There are some fun other twists too, including a returning Bludworth (Tony Todd) telling the characters that they can break the cycle by killing someone else. That leads to a very unusual ending as Peter (Miles Fisher) stalks the other survivors to kill them and claim their lives.

But for all the fun concepts here, the movie feels oddly flat. A second visit to the bad 3D CGI well does no one any favours and for the second time running, the series’ male protagonists are actively dull. D’Agosto is good, as are Fisher and Byrne but none of them or the rest have much to sink their teeth into. The movie wants to be a dark office comedy but doesn’t spend much time in the office. It wants to expand the mythos but neither the late great, Todd or Courtney B. Vance as the fed investigating the case get much to do. Not even serial Terrible Boss Portrayer David Koerchner gets a chance to do much. Worst of all, for the second time running the movie’s exuberantly horrible deaths are met with responses closer to ‘…huh’ than actual horror. Despite that, Final Destination 5 is enormously better than the previous movie and the killer twist that closes it is genuinely very impressive and raises some fascinating questions for the upcoming Bloodlines.

 

The Final Destination series is always fun, and often great. If you want to skip the weakest link, don’t bother with 4. But 1, 2, 3 and a lot of 5 will give you a really fun time. Even if you never look at log trucks, airliners, rollercoasters, motorways or bridges the same again.

Final Destination 1-5 are available on disc and streaming now,.

Final Destination: Bloodlines is out on May 14th