(Published on Rushes Online Film Magazine, and read this in In Retrospect – Issue 1)
Final Destination 5, directed by Steven Quale, sets itself up to be the final film in the Final Destination franchise. Although the Final Destination series as a whole is very predictable, this latest instalment brings something new to its supposed end with the new rule of ‘kill or be killed’.
Beginning in the same way as the others, Sam Lawton (Nicholas D’Agosto) has a premonition of how he and his friends are going to die. This time around, Sam is sitting on a bus filled with his colleagues when he sees the bridge on which his bus is driving across collapse and all of his friends die in a variety of brutal and gore-filled ways. But death doesn’t like to be cheated, and one by one it begins to kill the eight survivors of the accident who are now living on death’s borrowed time. Can the group find a way of defeating death without turning against each other?