The spectacular bridge collapse that begins “Final Destination 5” answers the question that always occurs to me on my infrequent excursions across the GW Bridge: What would happen if one of these cables snapped? Now that the movie has provided a colorful illustration of the answer, I think I’ll just stay in Manhattan for the rest of my life. I had my doubts about New Jersey, anyway.
As “Rosemary’s Baby” fit the Manson era and “Friday the 13th” captured 1980 teens’ nervousness about sex, the “Final Destination” series provides a clever brand of generation-specific horror. These movies romp with the idea of bike-helmet babies coming of age as the infrastructure around them crumbles.
“Final Destination 5,” which, despite its lowbrow story, turns out to be one of the fastest-moving films of the year, is a suspenseful and macabre exercise in dread for the absurdly cosseted.
Young adults born in the 1980s and early 1990s leaped out of nicotine- and alcohol-free wombs to be deemed geniuses every time they passed a test, awarded trophies every time they caught a ball and tucked into comfy car seats on the victory ride over to their favorite sushi palace.
They took groovy public-service internships at an age when their grandfathers were sweating on assembly lines or being shot at by Nazis, lived with their parents until they were 28, then proceeded directly to their shrinks for marathon weeping sessions every time they messed up a project at work. They’re as soft as pudding, and they know it. The Greatest Generation didn’t need triathlons or X-treme skateboarding; every Friday night was a thrill ride after manual labor and eight Schlitzes.
“FD5,” like other films in the series, depends heavily on the witty machinations of the screenplay. It keeps coming up with ridiculously bloody answers to questions like: How might you die in a brutal massage mishap? To a highly trained gymnast, could a balance beam prove your undoing? And: What could possibly go wrong during laser eye surgery?
As usual, Death comes to cash a few checks after a group of young people narrowly escapes the opening catastrophe. Most of the characters are fatally bland, while others are aggressively loathsome, especially P.J. Byrne’s Isaac, a sleazy skirt chaser who, when 18 of his co-workers are killed, steals spare change and anything else he can find in their desks. He lifts a coupon for a free massage at the local spa, where the employees are Asian women. “Yum, yum, dim sum,” he says, ogling a pair of delicious-looking, um, sweet buns.
Isaac’s demise is the most hilariously engineered, involving a crazy series of sudden reversals of fortune, and Byrne’s sporting performance makes the most of his big scene. Other actors, notably the three leads (Nicholas D’Agosto, Miles Fisher and Emma Bell), don’t make much of an impression, but that’s OK. As with goldfish, you shouldn’t get too attached to any “Final Destination” characters.
A lot of damage in these films results from old standbys such as car and airplane crashes, but there’s a sense that Death is bored by such easy pickings. The brilliance of the movies is that if you look too closely around you, the world starts to look very Final Destination. A fan whines, an electrical cord is frayed, a screw comes loose and any of these things (or, more likely, all of these things) can ruin your day.
Previous generations constructed an amazing world — but nothing new gets built anymore, and now all the old stuff is being held together by rust. The millennials who keep flocking to these movies do so out of a vague sense of feeling spoiled and cheated at the same time.