Metacritic reviews

It's the best 3D horror movie ever made, as much for its superlative technical merits as for its satisfying thrills.

If the series really does end here, may this final installment be hailed as a triumph of poetic justice.

To borrow from TV terminology, the series hasn't jumped the shark yet, but the strain of inventing bizarre deaths is beginning to show.

This latest entry in the 11-year-old horror series duly adheres to tradition by providing inventively grisly demises for various characters.

They (fans) know what they enjoy. They don't want no damn movies with damn surprises. I am always pleased when moviegoers have a good time; perhaps they will return to a theater and someday see a good movie by accident, and it will start them thinking.

If more of the picture had the inventively grotesque payoff of the scene set at the gymnastics tryout, capped by a female character's inarguably poor dismount, we might have something to puke home about.

Director Steven Quale is economical: He ditches plot altogether, delivering instead nothing but set pieces. He does come up with a few genuinely creepy moments of Hitchcockian edge-of-your-seat suspense and a few very inventive deaths.

While FD5 is less generic and less facilely goofy and ironic than past series installments, it's still a rote execution of formula that scores its biggest points with self-aware references to its predecessors - including a closing-credits montage of kills from Final Destinations past.

This isn't the worst of the bunch, not by far. But my premonition is this won't be the finale this series has screamed out for these past few years. This decapitation train never seems to reach its destination.

The cheap thrills wear off way fast, and we're left with atrocious acting, feeble writing and clueless directing (from first-timer Steven Quale). The horror! The horror!