By the time we got to Final Destination 5, this franchise had already flatlined. After the headache that was The Final Destination, it felt like the creative team had run out of traps to spring, blood to splatter, or ideas worth watching. But then this one shows up. Still flawed, still full of cardboard characters and a script that barely counts as dialogue, but it has one thing the others don’t.
It has the ending.
More on that in a bit. First, we have to talk about the rest of the movie. And unfortunately, the rest is exactly what you’d expect: a new group of attractive twenty-somethings cheating death, followed by a parade of over-complicated fatalities and one dude yelling about “the order” while everyone else looks confused. You know the drill.
Bridge Over Troubled Writing
The big disaster this time is a suspension bridge collapse. Sam, our perfectly fine but completely forgettable lead, has a vision of the collapse while on a work retreat. It’s a good sequence — not quite on the level of the highway in Part 2 or the rollercoaster in Part 3, but it’s big, chaotic, and shot with just enough tension to hook you for a minute.
Sam freaks out, pulls a few people off the bus, and the vision comes true. Now, death is back on its passive-aggressive rampage, punishing these lucky survivors for not dying when they were supposed to. Again. The twist this time? There’s a rumor that if you kill someone else, you can take their spot and live. A dark moral choice, sure, but also a flimsy excuse to pad the runtime with fake ethical dilemmas between death scenes.
A Cast of Forgettables
Sam is a chef. That’s about as much as we get. He wants to move to Paris, he has a girlfriend he’s semi-broken up with, and that’s it. Emma Bell plays said girlfriend, Molly, and tries her best with what little she’s given. Miles Fisher plays Peter, the guy who eventually starts spiraling into murder logic, and even though he’s more interesting than anyone else on screen, he still feels like a character borrowed from a better movie.
And then there’s David Koechner, playing the kind of boss who was probably funnier on paper, and a handful of other death-candidates who exist solely to die in ways that would make OSHA combust.
Tony Todd returns, once again, to whisper creepy metaphors and vaguely hint at rules no one can actually follow. At this point, his appearances feel more like a contractual haunting than anything the story actually needs.
The Deaths: Some Are Great, Most Are Silly
This series always lives or dies (pun intended) by how inventive and entertaining the death scenes are. Here, we get a few standouts. A gymnastics sequence turns into a full-body crunch that’s nasty in the best way. An acupuncture scene gives us fake-out tension before delivering something truly ridiculous. A laser eye surgery death is just gross, which earns it some points.
But even the better kills in this movie feel like they’re running on fumes. The setups are long. The tension is fine. But you can feel the writers straining to make every paperclip and coffee mug feel like a weapon. It’s starting to feel like death is a prop comic. The energy is just a little too try-hard.
That Ending Though…
Okay. Let’s talk about it.
If you’ve never seen Final Destination 5 before, the ending might hit you like a freight train. For those who have, it still slaps. Throughout the whole movie, there’s this weird offness. The style feels slightly retro. The fashion choices don’t quite add up. The characters make references that feel dated. It all feels like an accidental time warp.
And then it clicks.
The twist reveals that this movie is actually a prequel to the first Final Destination. Sam and Molly board a plane. That plane. Flight 180. We are watching the original disaster unfold from another angle. The characters we’ve just spent the whole movie with are unknowingly boarding a flight that we already know is doomed.
It’s such a good twist that it almost makes you forget how average the rest of the movie is. Almost. The final shot, where the Flight 180 chaos connects with everything we’ve seen, hits like a cold slap. It’s clever, unexpected, and completely revitalizes your opinion of the film… for about five minutes.
Final Thoughts
Final Destination 5 is a mostly forgettable entry in a franchise that was already wheezing. The deaths are okay, the characters are thin, and the moral conflict feels half-baked. But that ending? That’s the one time the franchise genuinely outsmarts the audience. It’s the kind of reveal that makes you want to rewatch the movie, even if the rest of it doesn’t really deserve the effort.
This isn’t the best Final Destination movie. But it absolutely has the best ending. And in a franchise built around death’s timing, that kind of final impression counts for something.