VOD News | On 23, May 2025

Director: David R Ellis
Cast: Bobby Campo, Shantel VanSanten, Nick Zano, Haley Webb, Krista Allen, Andrew Fiscella, Mykelti Williamson
Certificate: 15

It was always going to be better than calling it “4nal Destination”, but the definite article at the front of The Final Destination’s title sets expectations that the franchise’s fourth outing is going to be the best – if not, the last. But actually, it ends up as neither.

Directed by returning helmer David R Ellis (Final Destination 2) and with Final Destination 2’s Eric Bress penning the script, there was every reason to be optimistic about what this outing has to offer. But somewhere between the drawing board and the final, three-dimensional creation, the film gets distracted by the idea of being the franchise’s first outing to be in 3D.

That means some extremely in-your-face gore, and there’s definitely something satisfying in seeing the franchise embrace the silliness of its premise and put aside slow-burn fear in favour of gleefully unabashed splatter. But the set pieces get off to an unusually uneven start, with the introduction set at a race track – where cars start flying everywhere and the audience stand ends up collapsing. It’s a notably un-everyday scenario for most audiences, which robs the opening of the franchise’s usual nausea-inducing knack of tapping into intrusive thoughts – later incidents involving a drain pipe at a swimming pool and a car wash get too carried away with the nastiness to dwell on the build-up of tension. Indeed, one stunt involving a grid fence is included just to make cinema audiences recoil.

The characters also aren’t up to much, with the only notable one of the bunch being a racist truck driver – a subplot that isn’t treated seriously enough to add any heft to proceedings. The use of CCTV footage to try and identify the next intended victim – despite the fact that the victims they’re spotting obviously aren’t in the real-life car crash – struggles to convince as a method for outwitting Death, although there’s a clever subversion of the franchise’s formula when someone attempts to go out on their own terms but Death thwarts it.

The result is an underwhelming entry in the franchise’s creepy canon, which leaves its Rube Goldberg origins a little too far behind. Why, then, bother to catch it at all? Because the final act almost manages to redeem the entire thing, with an inspired set piece that takes place in an actual cinema – a self-aware chuckle coupled with a genuinely unsettling play on everyone’s childhood fears of moving escalators. If you only watched the last 20 minutes, you’d have a thrilling Final Destination short – the fact that the whole runtime is only 80 minutes perhaps tells you all you need to know.

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