Final Destination 5: slow teases, comic carnage

Death doesn't like to get cheated again in Final Destination 5, the latest movie in the horror series that goes back to 2000. In each film, a group of young people narrowly escape a collective disaster, only to die subsequently in a succession of gruesome and improbably elaborate ways.

Repeating the basic setup of its predecessors, Final Destination 5 introduces a group of office workers from a paper company, boarding a bus for a corporate retreat. Salesman and aspiring chef Sam (Nicholas D'Agosto) has a sudden premonition of disaster as the bus drives onto a suspension bridge (Vancouver's Lions Gate Bridge), imagining his colleagues crushed, impaled and dismembered in various spectacular ways. He demands that the bus stop, narrowly saving himself and seven fellow employees from catastrophe. The survivors, whom the media dub The Lucky Eight, include his girlfriend Molly (Emma Bell) and high-strung friend Peter (Miles Fisher).

Relief is soon followed by foreboding at a company funeral, where a creepy coroner (Tony Todd) warns that Death doesn't like to take "Later, Dude" for an answer.

The first victim, a young woman gymnast, fatally dismounts from the uneven bars in a position that would baffle even a Cirque du Soleil contortionist. By the time the survivors are down to the Lucky Five, a detective ( Law and Order's Courtney B. Vance) applies his sleuthing logic: "Two is a coincidence," he intones. "Three is … a pattern."

As the survivors realize they're being systematically harvested by the Grim Reaper, they race around town trying to save each other.

Director Steven Quale (previously known for his effects and second unit work with James Cameron) stages the death scenes with intermittently effective black humour to juice up a premise that, essentially, has all the suspense of watching the line at an abattoir. Consequently, each death scene is a slow tease as we try to guess which flickering light bulb, loose screw, acupuncture needle, dripping pipe or dangling hook is going to deliver the coup de grace.

"Six systems had to fail for this to happen," points out Vance's number-conscious detective after a fatal mishap at a laser eye surgery clinic. And his analysis doesn't even include the teddy bear's glass eye on the floor.

Screenwriter Eric Heisserer (who wrote last year's A Nightmare on Elm Street reboot) introduces a new wrinkle to the Final Destination mythology: Victims can escape their destiny by offering a fresh corpse in their place. But the idea is developed only enough to justify an inessential action scene, at risk of contradicting the plot's premise that each person's exit is pre-determined.

Acting demands here are appropriately minimal – terror, followed by moments of false relief, then more terror. Veteran Final Destination fans know it really doesn't pay to get emotionally invested in the fates of the clueless victims.

Periodically, thanks to the 3-D, a long and pointy object emerges from the screen, threatening to impale the viewers through their eyeballs, enhancing the movie's guilty pleasure by reminding us that we, too, are made of vulnerable flesh and bone.

Final Destination 5