The series’ supposed final “Destination” is a better, well-conceived sequel than the earlier entries. Sam Lawton (Nicholas D’Agosto) is on a business retreat. On a bus on a commuter bridge he has a psychic premonition envisioning a foreboding disaster. The quick-thinking, stalwart young man takes charge, whisking passengers from the vehicle on the rapidly disintegrating structure. It’s an exciting sequence in which he, his girl Molly Harper (Emma Bell), his co-worker friend Peter Friedkin (Miles Fisher, a Tom Cruise lookalike), and others survive death’s clutches in hairbreadth escapes. The discontented Grim Reaper expects the chosen ones who cheated him to pay the ultimate price, and one by one, each succumbs to a uniquely inventive demise. Amidst horrors, there’s gallows humor when a gymnast (Ellen Wroe) is bent out of shape performing acrobatics. Jacqueline MacInnes Wood’s character has an eye-opening denouement during an ophthalmology procedure. Pins and needles are the living end for a womanizer (P.J. Byrne) in a bizarre acupuncture session.
Fledgling director Steven Quale, in his feature film debut, actually takes this high-tech dreck and breathes some new life into the retreaded franchise. Integrated with black comedic moments, there is cinematic excitement despite the overly contrived set-ups of appliances, house-wares, vehicles and building machinery which become deadly weapons. In Rube Goldberg improvisations of everyday implements, one part sets off another unit in a chain of events culminating in death. “Candyman’s” Tony Todd appears as mortician William Bludworth, a coroner with an ominous penchant for morbidity in this stylishly devised horror entry.
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