Final Destination 5

Death is back looking for revenge in the imaginatively titled "Final Destination 5 - 3D." That's sarcasm, by the way, because it's really hard to review a film like "FD5" as it is exactly what you expect, and there is no way to disguise what you're getting.

For the uninitiated, here's the plot of all five "Final Destination" films: A group of young adults survive a freak accident, only to have Death get pissed off and go after them. But Death is kind of a joker, so he makes sure his victims all die in surprising and violent ways just to entertain the rest of us. Oh, Death.

In this latest installment, a group of office workers at a paper plant is headed to a weekend retreat when their bus comes to a stop on a suspension bridge. For reasons we never know (and never have in any other installment), one character -- Sam (played by the adorable Nicholas D'Agosto) -- has a vision of the bridge collapsing, resulting in most of his co-workers dying in awful and disgusting ways. When he snaps out of his little day-terror, he grabs his ex-girlfriend Molly (Emma Bell) and tells everyone to get off the bus. Some do. Some don't. But the bridge does, indeed, collapse and a handful escape death.

But not for long. One by one the remaining "Lucky Eight" are picked off in gruesome ways. In past installments, the deaths were all Rube Goldberg-esque, with one minor event causing a chain reaction that eventually led to the death of one of the characters. While this device is used sparingly here, this time writer Eric Heisserer and director Steven Quale resort to fake-outs by setting up a series of possible accidents, only to have the least expected of them actually occur. The end result is always a lot of 'ickiness' that, for some insane reason, tickles the audience. Maybe it's because the deaths are so gruesome that we root for the filmmaker's audacity. But I'd still like to hear a therapist's take on why we cheer when someone is impaled by a flagpole.

Anyway, person after person dies in freakish ways (I will never have Lasik after seeing this), so our hero has to figure out how to make sure he doesn't join their number. There is an added rule this time around that reveals a possible way to keep from having Death maul you, and there is a final twist in the film that really is pretty clever.

That said, there's nothing that brilliant going on here, and it's grosser than it needs to be. (Please, filmmakers, less is more.) The acting is fairly good, and there is a lot of humor -- almost so much that it plays as sort of a comedy. D'Agosto is an appealing hero and the filmmaking itself is well played. The misstep is that the rules are explained again and since we've seen this four times already, the scenes in which the characters slowly piece together what's happening are tiring.

"FD5" is like eating at McDonalds. You go there because know exactly what it's going to taste like. You also know it's going to be a little bit gross, but you eat it anyway because somehow it still tastes so good. With every bite, you might die a little bit inside, but you still go back for more.