A real car crash of a movie.

The franchise’s worst premonition wasn’t the stock car crash, or the collapsing escalator, or even the swimming pool death so contrived it borders on performance art. No, the most ominous sign came when the fourth film dropped the numbering and slapped on a definitive article instead. The Final Destination arrived with the unconvincing bravado of a franchise announcing its own climax while quietly hedging its bets.

Gone is the sinister intricacy of the first three films. What we get instead is a collection of digital kill sketches, rushed through a perfunctory plot like a theme park attraction that’s been patched with gaffer tape and rendered in mid-budget CGI. The opening disaster – a NASCAR pile-up viewed through a haze of cheap 3D and CGI blood splatters – is less premonition and more bland redneck mash-’em-up. Cars flip, engines explode, debris flies directly at the camera and ominously crumbling infrastructure collapses with a distinct lack of physical presence in a naked bid to scare the audience’s inner child and shockr their outer eyeballs.

Director David R Ellis, who handled Final Destination 2 with such confident, kinetic flair, returns here with none of that energy. Whether it’s a case of creative disinterest or a casualty of the franchise trying to retrofit itself around a 3D gimmick, everything about this film feels flatter. Even Death seems bored. The kills, while occasionally inventive on paper, are staged like haunted house punchlines. There’s no sense of timing or build-up – just laborious set, snap, splatter.

Worst of all, the film seems to know it. Its self-awareness isn’t clever or meta; it’s a shrug. The characters are barely sketched, the dialogue feels procedurally generated, and the mechanics of Death’s design – previously laid out with such cruel elegance – now feel like an afterthought. The tension that once came from trying to decode Death’s logic is gone, replaced with a joyless game of “guess which object will improbably fly off the shelf first.”

Tony Todd, who lent the first two films a mythic menace and even graced Final Destination 3 with a voice cameo, wisely gives this one a miss altogether. In his absence, there’s no anchor here, no voice of doom in the morgue or beyond. Just pixels, plywood, and a faint smell of creative bankruptcy as a bunch of generic teens are fed into a digital meat grinder in carnage that feels like an obligation rather than an opportunity.

The Final Destination could have been a victory lap. Instead, it’s a bellyflop into the diving pool, with Death treading water as the Final Destination franchise itself is floundering. Ironically, the least entertaining and least well-made entry in the franchise ended up being the most financially successful of the franchise so of course it wasn’t the final anything. Not even creatively phoning it in, apparently, can kill Death.