2011's Final Destination 5 Represents Yet Another Creative Triumph for the Underrated Franchise

I would like to thank the paid subscribers of Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas for making me watch, no, experience the magic and wonder of the Final Destination films at exactly the right time. 

I wasn’t expecting Final Destination to beat Child’s Play, Halloween, Friday the 13th, and Saw in a poll to become the next franchise I covered after A Nightmare on Elm Street. But I’m glad it won because it was just the diversion I had been looking for. 

A mere week ago, I was, at best, a casual fan of the Final Destination movies. I’d seen a few, I think, maybe, and regarded them as a minor guilty pleasure. 

Now, seven miraculous days later, I’ve seen every damn movie in the series. All five! Okay, that’s not a huge number of entries for a hit horror franchise, but it’s enough to build a rich world full of lore, not unlike Lord of the Rings, the gloomy cosmic mythology of H.P. Lovecraft, and Five Nights at Freddy’s. 

Also like Five Nights at Freddy’s, the lore is stupid. Good lord, is it ever stupid! Yet that’s part of the fun. 

Only the Final Destination masterpieces of cinema are superior because they involve random projectiles flying through some dope’s eyeball, killing them instantly and leaving them a gory pile of viscera, brain, and goo. 

I’m excited that there’s a Final Destination film lurking tantalizingly in the near future in 2026’s Final Destination: Bloodlines because I’ve become quite a fan of the series and do not want this rollercoaster ride to end. 

I’ve come to have quite a bit of affection for this weird world. Thankfully, there are nine official tie-in novels and two comic books for me to continue my journey, but even I know my limits. I’m sorry, the one person who wants me to write about the Final Destination. I can’t do it. It just wouldn’t make sense from a cost/benefit perspective.  

The Final Destination movies are all about reading the signs and understanding that there are no accidents. So it’s spooky that Tony Todd, the franchise’s marquee star and expert on all things morbid and macabre, died just after I began the series, just like PRETTY MUCH EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER IN THESE MOVIES DOES! That’s true of pretty much everyone BUT Todd’s character, ironically.

True, he died peacefully after a long illness, whereas the franchise's characters are more likely to die from a statue falling on them or a steel rod penetrating their cerebral cortex, but death is death. There are no coincidences. There are no accidents. 

2011’s Final Destination 5 followed in the footsteps of 2009’s The Final Destination and gave us the most inevitable freak deaths in film history IN ALL THREE DIMENSIONS. 

As a franchise in which projectiles are always flying around killing people, Final Destination was made for 3D. This plays to the series’ liberating vulgarity as well as its cynicism, sadism, and nihilism.

Final Destination 5 immediately got on my good side with an opening credit sequence that’s nothing but deadly detritus flying at the screen. I am a fan of 3-D. More specifically, I am a fan of the kind of 3-D where shit flies at you in the most pandering and obviously possible fashion. 

That, thankfully, is the way Final Destination 5 uses 3-D: shamelessly and correctly. The shit that is flying at us in 3-D are callbacks to the instruments of death featured in the previous four entries in the series. 

Final Destination 5 begins and ends on a blissfully bleak note by reminding us that before a fuck-ton of characters died in freak accidents in this installment, even more cursed souls perished in the movies that preceded it.

The Final Destination movies are a celebration and an exploration of death at its most unrelenting and gimmicky. 

The hopelessly bland Nicholas D’Agosto stars as Sam Lawton, an employee at Presage Paper, where he works for Dennis Lapman. Lapman is played by David Koechner, who was guesting regularly on The Office, which also involves a paper company when he became the sole funnyman to appear in a Final Destination movie. 

Final Destination 5 deviates from earlier entries by focusing on young, and not so young, adults who work for a company as the protagonists rather than high school or college kids. 

The blockbuster fourth sequel differs from the films that came before it in some other crucial ways but otherwise follows the series' tried-and-true formula. 

That formula dictates that our hero has a premonition of disaster that leads him or her to freak out and narrowly avoid doing something that would have resulted in a bizarre and colorful death. 

In this case, Sam has a premonition that a bridge will collapse due to high winds, plunging the bus he and his coworkers are taking to a team-building exercise into a watery abyss. 

It could be argued that horrific group death is preferable to a team-building exercise, but Sam nevertheless freaks out and convinces ex-girlfriend Molly (Emma Bell) to get off the bus with him. 

The formula calls for at least a handful of doomed survivors to escape death momentarily, so the underwhelming, extremely white hero and heroine are joined by Koechner's cartoonishly oblivious boss, pals Nathan Sears (Arlen Escarpeta) and Peter Friedkin (Miles Fisher), Peter’s gymnast girlfriend Candice (Ellen Wroe) and tough, sexy coworkers Olivia Castle (Jacqueline MacInnes Wood) and horndog Isaac Palmer (P.J Byrne). 

Final Destination movies often have a comic relief character who is generally super horny or super stoned. The Final Destination has super horny comic relief in Byrne, who is constantly pursuing sex despite being a bit of a goober. 

In Final Destination 5, Isaac gets a massage at one of the film’s many deathtraps. He’s hoping to get a happy ending from a sexy young masseuse. Instead, he gets the unhappiest of unhappy endings after a stern older woman sticks acupuncture needles in him that stab him when he falls off the massage table, and the room goes up in flame. 

The world of Final Destination is EXTREMELY flammable. Things are always being set accidentally ablaze. Lots of casualties burn to death while others reach their doom fleeing the franchise’s constant deadly blazes. 

Tony Todd’s morbid mortician, Mr. Bludworth, lurks menacingly on the periphery of the action. When we first see him, he’s hanging out at a cemetery during a funeral for our heroes’ coworkers. 

It doesn’t really make sense for Todd to appear in more than one Final Destination movie. It barely makes sense for him to show up in the first one and reveal death’s circuitous design without ever saying how he acquired such forbidden knowledge. 

But Todd was so good in Final Destination, and Mr. Bludworth was such a fan favorite that they kept shoe-horning him into the action in non-organic but very fun ways. 

In Final Destination 5, Mr. Bludworth introduces a new wrinkle: survivors can stay alive, or at least buy some time, by taking another life in addition to saving or creating one. 

This leads to a third act where Peter turns heel and decides to murder Molly and take her lifespan. The abstract concept of death is the bad guy in this series, except for this entry, where the heavy is the abstract concept of death AND that creep Peter. 

This twist doesn’t really work, nor do attempts to flesh out the characters beyond broad archetypes. Having watched and enjoyed every movie in this series, I can vouch that these movies are popular for the set pieces where chumps get impaled, beheaded, vivisected, or otherwise messed with, not for their dialogue or characterizations. 

Binging the Final Destination series has temporarily changed how I see the world. When I leave my home and perambulate about my neighborhood, I see everything as a potential source of danger and death. 

For example, yesterday, we had a representative from Stanley Steemer clean our carpets. I counted at least three or four different ways that his presence could result in my freak death, from tripping over the wires of his vacuum to tripping to getting my face ironed. 

I see the world as a terrifying place full of things that can AND WILL kill me, and it’s still sunnier and more hopeful than other ways I could be feeling right now. 

Final Destination 5 has a twist ending. So if you don’t want it spoiled for you, you precious, precious snowflake, living your sheltered life in Snowflaketopia, where all you ever encounter are unicorns and rainbows and people who agree with your political beliefs, stop reading now because I am about to reveal some harsh truths that will shatter your worldview and probably drive you permanently insane.  

I did not realize it because I didn’t properly discern the signs, but Final Destination 5 is a period piece, like Howard’s End or Porky’s 2, set at the turn of the millennium. 

That’s because our heroes, foolishly convinced that they’ve beaten death’s grand design, got onboard a flight to Paris. 

But it’s not any flight to Paris. No, this is FLIGHT 180. The year is 2000, and high school kid Alex Morgan just freaked out after having an eerie premonition that the flight would crash and was removed, along with a teacher and several peers. 

That’s right: Final Destination 5 ends where the series fundamentally begins: with a telepathic kid freaking the hell out and escaping death, but only for a while. 

The series travels full circle, which means that what we think happened in the present actually happened over a decade earlier. 

Reader, I am not too proud to concede that this twist BLEW MY FUCKING MIND! I was rendered speechless with surprise. Whoever wrote and directed this film deserves all of the awards and money in the world for that twist. 

In the Final Destination universe, your reward for divining death’s dark design and outsmarting it is living slightly longer than everyone else. 

Because you survived, you die last, which is way worse than not dying or dying of old age. 

The Final Destination makes death goofy fun, an absolute blast. The franchise’s appeal speaks to the essence of escapism, horror movie-style. It’s full of darkness, corpses, and despair, yet also strangely light and inconsequential. 

The deaths in these films can’t hurt you. They can only entertain you individually and en masse. Final Destination 5 makes freak deaths freaky fun. 

Thank you for the bleak laughs, Final Destination, and all of the wonderful deaths.