My wife was going to have a party one Saturday afternoon where a lady was going to be selling jewelry. Any time there’s a party like this going on, it’s a good excuse for me to be away from the house. I suggested to my son that we go to the movies. He replied that mom said it was ok for him to be there, but I encouraged him to go out for a guy trip that afternoon. I had suggested a movie for us, but he said something about going to see Final Destination 5. At that point, I had never seen any of the Final Destination movies. He was at least familiar with them and assured me that it would be good.
I was expecting a typical teenage slasher film, so I didn’t know what I was getting into. The basic premise of the films in this series it that a major disaster is about to happen that will kill several people. One of the people has a premonition of the disaster right before it happens and successfully escapes the situation before they die and rescue several other people in the process. Because they have cheated death, death comes after each of them in the order that they died in the premonition. The way each is set up, there are several hazardous threats to their lives, but the way they eventually die is a contrived, ridiculous thing that you never saw coming. I was expecting to be scared but ended up laughing throughout the film. I was suspenseful, but never scary. We also watched it in 3D and this is one of the better-looking 3D films that I’ve ever seen.
We had a great time watching the film and told the rest of the family about it. The next weekend, we all went to see it. We barely made it through the opening credits and my wife said she was ready to see someone get killed. Soon after, they had the premonition scene where a bridge collapses and many people are killed. The family liked this movie.
There is a scene in the film where one of the survivors is getting LASIK eye surgery. She gets killed when her head is trapped in the unattended equipment and the laser goes out of control. Many years after I had watched this movie, I tried not to think about it when I was having laser assisted cataract surgery.
