Rating: 4 / 5
Director: Steven Quale
Contains spoilers
So, my boyfriend wanted to watch this since we watched part 3 the other day. This was the only one I had left, so I have now seen all of the Final Destination films. It's been a while since I've seen 1,2, and 4, though, so I was kind of confused throughout this one. This and the third are the only ones that are really fresh in my mind, and I noticed that the rules differ in the two movies. In the third, they were able to intervene with peoples' deaths, and then death would skip over that person. In this one, it was "kill or be killed," and they could force someone else to take their place on death's list. I was confused as to what the rules really were, and if this one (or the third) just messed up. So I did a little searching.
It turns out that death doesn't have just one set of rules, of course, because death can do whatever it wants. Even though there are rules that will let a person be skipped, death can never truly be cheated. We know from the ending scenes of each movie that even the survivors are killed (or are assumed to have been killed) anyway. So the rules don't really matter anyway, but they're interesting.
In this one, a group of co-workers were on their way to a business retreat. They were on a charter bus crossing a bridge that was under construction. It was one of those suspension bridges that hang on wires. I'm glad that there are none of those where I live, because they're freaky and are enough to cause any person to be a little bit nervous. But Sam was more than a little bit nervous. As is usual in the series, Sam had a premonition of the bridge collapsing, killing everyone. He got a few of the passengers off the bus, including his girlfriend Molly. In his vision, he was actually able to save Molly by getting her across the gap in time, so she wasn't on Death's list at all. Sadly, the rest were on Death's list, and they were not able to be saved. As usual, everyone who survived started dying in really fucked up ways.
One girl, a gymnast, died in a freak gymnastics accident, where she flew off the uneven bars and folded her body in a very unnatural position. A guy had his head crushed by a Buddha statue. One of the girl's had a laser eye surgery go horribly wrong, only to die by falling out of a window. There actually were some pretty gruesome things in this one, but that doesn't surprise me. They've all been pretty gruesome. At the end, it turned into a sort of slasher movie, with one of the guys trying desperately to cash in on the "kill or be killed" theory, only to have it fail miserably.
Tony Todd returned in this one as the creepy coroner who knew just a little too much about Death's design. Nicholas D'Agosto (Heroes, Fired Up) starred as Sam, and Emma Bell (The Walking Dead) played Molly. David Koechner (The Office, Anchorman) was Dennis, the boss.
So, let's take a look at the rules. There are a couple of things that can be done to temporarily cheat death. One: if someone intervenes, you will be skipped. But as soon as Death complete the original chain, it will start over and come back to you. So this will only save you temporarily. Two, you can kill someone else and have them take your place, but you will only live as long as that person was supposed to live--which might not be very long, as one of the guys in this one found out. Apparently suicide doesn't work, because Death wants you to die on its own terms, not your own. Death never forgets. You can cheat it once, you can cheat it twice, but you can't cheat it forever.
Throughout this movie, I felt like it didn't live up to the others. The "slasher" aspect of it closer to the end seemed kind of weird, as I'm used to freak accidents being the killers here. But the ending was so great that I completely forgot about that. With the ending to this one, the whole series wrapped around on itself. We don't know until the end that it actually takes place in the year 2000. Sam gets an internship, and he and Molly board flight 180 on their way to Paris. After they board, a freaked out guy with blonde hair starts screaming that everyone needs to get off the plane because it's going to explode.
For the most part, this movie was okay. But I thought the ending was an incredible idea, and it really made the movie a lot better. That's what saved it for me.
So, why are these movies so terrifying? Because it confirms our fears that death cannot be cheated. Death will not forget you, and it will come for you eventually. It's also crazy to see all the tiny, little things that come together to cause death. And if you think these scenarios were only created for these movies, and that they're not realistic and can't actually happen...Watch the TV show 1,000 Ways to Die. Things like that happen every single day. You never know what's going to kill you. And if you're able to avoid it...it won't be long before Death comes back for you.
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