24/05/2

Cineworld, Edinburgh

Another long-running franchise gets a reboot – and since the Final Destination films operate on well-established ground rules, it’s questionable how much originality film-making duo Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein can hope to inject into the proceedings. The first FD arrived back in 2009 and there’s been a fourteen-year interval since the imaginatively titled Final Destination 5, so I decide to go along and see what they’ve come up with…

To give them their due, the film starts well with a flashback to the 1960s, a young couple paying a visit to a swanky restaurant perched on a tower hundreds of feet in the air. After a decent interval while a few worrying details are set up, there’s a fabulous extended set-piece, where pretty much everyone present hurtles to messy destruction. Whereupon, we realise that this isn’t something that has actually happened, but an event that was avoided thanks to a timely premonition by Iris (Brec Bassinger). But as we already know, Death hates to be cheated and, over the years, he has claimed most of the lives of those present. He is now ready to start in on their relatives…

We cut to the present day, where college student Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Huana) is being troubled by dreams about the event in which her grandmother played such a key role. She pays a visit to Iris (now played by Gabrielle Rose), a recluse who has kept herself locked safely away from Death’s retribution for many years. But, she warns her granddaughter, any surviving members of the Immediate family are in real danger if she doesn’t warn them about what’s coming…

We know how it goes from hereon in. Death – who, as ever, seems to have based his game plan on regular re-treadings of the works of Anton Chekhov – likes to employ everyday objects in his murderous quests, a sort of Heath Robinson approach to the art of bloodshed. If the camera should linger on a small detail – a dropped coin, a misplaced shard of glass, the ‘on’ switch of a rotary mower – we know that said detail is going to play an important role in the dismemberment of the next victim. Again, to their credit, the four screenwriters who put this together have a lot of fun using elements of suspense, misdirection and shock to achieve their ends and, though the deaths are uniformly gory, they are so absurdly cartoonish that it’s hard not to laugh out loud as the latest victim is er… disassembled.

For me, perhaps because that opening set piece is so OTT, the ensuing chaos feels like the law of diminishing returns, each kill slightly less impressive than the one before. This is probably the kind of film best enjoyed with a group of well-oiled friends, all laughing it up together. Whether it will be the progenitor of more FD misadventures will, I’m sure, depend on how much money it makes. Personally, I’d prefer to see this as a one-off event, rather than the start of another endless rollercoaster of death .

And talking of the Grim Reaper, it’s darkly ironic to note that there’s a cameo appearance here by the late Tony “Candyman” Todd, making his final filmed appearance as the guy who managed to cheat Death – and to whom the film is respectfully dedicated.

3.6 stars

Philip Caveney