It’s rare, but every so often, I get a bug in me to watch the entirety of a franchise I’d never seen before. Last year, it was Mission: Impossible. This year I decided to watch the entire Final Destination series.
I blame Amazon Prime, through which we have our HBO Max subscription. I was fishing around for something to watch, and Prime kept throwing FD movies at me under the guise of “We Think You’ll Like These” or whatever it’s called.
I can’t say they don’t know me; I DO love some franchised horror. And the FD movies sure had some snazzy looking posters on Prime. So what the hell? I gave it a shot.
And here we are, a few days later, and I’m about to rank what all I saw. It’s what I do. Let’s get into it!
For more Ranking The Franchise to see where I sorted out some of your favorites, click HERE for Friday the 13th, HERE for Halloween, HERE for A Nightmare On Elm Street, HERE for Child’s Play, or HERE for Mission: Impossible (I know, I know… one of these things is not like the others).
Every horror franchise needs to have their Jason Goes To Hell or their Halloween: Resurrection or their The Dream Child. And despite the rest of its resume being pretty steady and even-keeled (or even even-KILLED, ha!), Final Destination is unfortunately no different. So that’s where we start off, with part 4, better known as The Final Destination.
The Final Destination does little right. It does add a bit of humor to the proceedings, which was a somewhat welcome addition, but that’s the nicest thing I can say. And even then, the humor would be done better later in the franchise. Here, it just feels like they are testing it out to see how well it could fit in.
Aside from that, you’ve got easily the worst acting, dialogue, and characters of the entire franchise. No one is likable or memorable, and they certainly aren’t believable as human beings. It’s incomprehensible how bad the characters are from the bottom-up in this one.
You’ve also got shoehorned-in 3D effects because it was 2009, and doing that was all the rage. What that means is that the CGI effects look terrible, and there are dozens of forced “IT’S COMING RIGHT AT YOU” shots that take you OUT of the movie if you aren’t watching it in its original 3D.
Additionally, the inciting incident–the major accident that leads to the main character’s premonition–is the worst here as it’s just a minor-league NASCAR accident. AND there’s no Tony Todd cameo here!
This one is just the worst. Stay away.
My rating: 1* out of 5
There’s a somewhat large leap forward here from THE Final Destination, and I admittedly feel a little bad about this one finishing as low in the franchise as it is. But honestly, the next few are pretty indistinguishable from one another in their scores.
Perhaps I just feel guilty because this entry blesses us with the incomparable Ramona Flowers herself, Mary Elizabeth Winstead. She brings some actual acting gravitas to these films, and she is doing her best to carry the picture even as a lot of what’s going on around her was starting to feel a little bit tired by this, the third entry in the series.
To counter that, these movies like to throw in new wrinkles to the formula, and the gimmick here is that Wendy (Winstead) took photos the night of the accident that foretell everyone’s fate. So that’s a twist on the “visions”, right? Hey, it’s something.
If you get past Wendy, though, the characters are well on their way to their nadir in part four because they are pretty vapid and devoid of life in this one. No one besides Winstead is really noteworthy, except for maybe the Ian character, and that’s just because he turns into a villain halfway through the picture. He gets to chew some scenery as an antagonist, but it’s just a little bit of fun.
What else? Well our inciting incident here, while better than Death By NASCAR, is a rollercoaster accident, which is probably the second worst of the series. Also, while there isn’t exactly NO Tony Todd, there is precious little of him, as he is only a voice-over actor here.
My rating: 2.5* out of 5
Let’s get this one right out of the way: If parts 4 and 3 had the two worst premonition incidents in the series, Final Destination 2 has the best. It’s become a meme of the public consciousness; even before having SEEN this movie for a first time, if I saw a log truck on a highway, my brain would go “Final Destination 2, oh no!”, and I’d drive around it.
FD2 also takes advantage of what we saw at the end of its predecessor and brings back Ali Larter’s Clear into the goings-on. If we ignore Tony Todd, it’s the only time we see a previous character turn up in a relevant role. Clear is here to help this film’s protagonists avoid the ever-stalking hand of death.
The new trick that this dog teaches us is that the deaths in part one all inadvertently saved other lives, and those lives become the eventual victims here (and yes, they were spared by the accidents in part one, AND by the highway premonition here, so were they all technically on Death’s to-do list twice? It’s a little confusing). And it throws the order of things into disarray and makes the pattern of Death’s gets a little more unpredictable.
What’s holding this one back? Not too much. The deaths are fun here. But I guess the characters were well on their way to the slide towards awfulness. No one is really worth cheering for or caring about. So… it’s a basic horror franchise sequel. I guess what it boils down to is that I did LIKE this one, but I wasn’t terribly enamored of it or anything.
My rating: 2.75* out of 5
After the utter disappointment of part 4, things thankfully hit the upswing in a big way with Final Destination 5. The characters and dialogue and acting all rebounded to at least a Part 2 level, and that was a much needed salve.
The quality of the inciting incident improved dramatically, too, as part 5 features a very gnarly collapsing bridge sequence. It goes on for some time and features some very exciting foretold deaths and high quality destruction.
And while the FD franchise had always irrationally had an antagonist character (because just escaping Death’s Rube Goldbergian deaths isn’t exciting enough for some people, I suppose), this entry went all-in on the notion of turning one survivor heel. This even culminates in a full-on action-adventure fight scene in the final act, the likes of which we had never seen before in this series. And, surprise!, it’s actually a pretty engaging and well-shot on, so credit to the director and cinematography team for that.
More wrinkles are added in that we find a new way to cheat death’s machinations, giving our characters hope they had not had since part 2. The series really needed to toy with the idea that you can escape death and not just delay it, because otherwise these characters just aren’t worth rooting for. Though this leads to an epilogue that goes on a bit too long when just a glimpse would have been enough.
My rating: 3* out of 5
There’s nothing quite like a good originator to kick off a horror franchise, and that’s what we received with 2000’s Final Destination, the only one of these flicks where the title actually works as a pun because, you know, planes go to destinations.
From a solid early 2000’s cast that features Devon Sawa, Ali Larter, Sean William Scott, Kerr Smith, Tony Todd, and more, to a brand new and intriguing concept that death will follow you to get its revenge if you somehow cheat it, this was a true breakthrough film in the horror genre that definitely deserved to have a slew of sequels that could play with and [at least try to] improve upon its formula.
A psychic vision of death to be. A handful of seemingly lucky survivors. An ensuing mess of frightful accidents. It all just works here. It was an original phenom that caught fire and raked in over $110 million against a budget of just $23 million.
Sure the movie is a bit goofy. The characters make some extreme leaps in logic to figure out what is going on way faster than they should be able to, and that would have been an easy enough problem to solve simply by having a few more survivors from the plane explosion. Speaking of which, the explosion, while iconic, would end up being one-upped by a lot of the incidents in the rest of the series.
But who cares about any of that when the franchise made as much cultural impact as this one did?
My rating: 3.25* out of 5
As I watched the first five entries in this series, it seemed unlikely that anything was going to surpass the original offering as the top of the heap. And then I got to the [as it currently stands] last outing, and everything changed in that regard.
Bloodlines, which foregoes a numerical title in favor of a subtitle to try to draw in a bigger audience, is the entry that definitively gets the blend of humor and comedy right. It actually gives us more than just one or two “Heh, that was a silly death” chuckles; it has some witty writing all throughout the script.
I would argue that Bloodlines is the best written of the franchise in many regards. It has great deaths, as well as at least one great death fake-out. And while it may not be a patch on part 5 or the original, it has its own “Oh shit, okay!” ending that twists how you thought it was all going down.
The characters in this one feel more wholly developed and like people you want to cheer on, which is a substantial improvement for this franchise where so many of them have felt like so much paper mache. We get a story that spans decades and generations, making this entry particularly gratifying, too.
Oh, and we get the best, most meaningful, and surprisingly emotional William Bludworth scene, as an ailing Tony Todd reaches out past the camera and says goodbye to his fans.
My rating: 3.5 out of 5
*******
As always, those are just my thoughts. But what about yours? Let us know in the comments how YOU would rate this series. And do you think there is gas left in the tank? Should we ever see a Final Destination 7? Or should we let the franchise rest with Tony Todd?
Until next time… take care!
