So let’s talk about the Final Destination franchise. The sixth movie came out recently, and got a reasonable amount of mild praise. I’d assumed the whole series was garbage, so this actually inspired me to go back and watch the previous installments — a prospect made less daunting by the 90-minute length of each movie.

The fundamental premise of each movie, which isn’t a spoiler for anything past the first half hour of the first one (and probably not a spoiler at all if you haven’t been living under a rock for twenty years), is that a group of people cheat death by avoiding some big disaster… and then Death seeks to balance the score by killing them one by one.

The big draw of the series, then, is the death scenes. The way this almost always works is that the person goes into a situation that’s loaded with potential dangers: There’s a toaster with a frayed cord next to a leaking faucet and a knife that’s precariously balanced on the edge of the counter and idk a poisonous snake on the floor and also an open jug of hydrochloric acid on top of a shelf (oh wait, that last one is Fulci’s The Beyond), and you’re watching the person navigate this minefield… and then they die because their sealed bottle of fermenting kombucha explodes and impales them with glass shards.

It’s kinda silly, but also kinda fun… but also something that can’t really sustain even ninety minutes of movie all by itself, which is where the problem comes in. The challenge these movies face over and over again is how to actually give the characters any agency or something to do, rather than just waiting around for Death to kill them.

The strongest movies of the series are ones that find a plausible theory for how the characters can avoid their inevitable(?) fates, something to try to accomplish that might save their lives. That’s the first, third, and fifth. The weakest are those that just involve people panicking and running around and not really having any plausible goal at all, the second and fourth. (I mean, technically they have a goal, but it’s one that we’ve already seen fail in a previous movie, so we know they’re doomed whether or not they succeed in their efforts, making the “plot” of the movie just so much time-killing filler. The third and fifth introduce new, and therefore plausible, attempts to avoid fate.)

Still, even the ones with plausibly-interesting plots don’t have much going on beyond their big death setpieces. The acting is reliably terrible (basically none of the kids in these movies has gone on to do anything, and you can see why); the characters are broad (as you have to establish a whole 6+ person crew within minutes, and few of them survive past their first movie); and everything else about the movies is best described as serviceable, if you’re being generous.

I can’t really recommend these, and I especially can’t recommend binging them — which highlights and exacerbates their structural problems — but they’re amiable enough that I’ll still watch the sixth one when it’s available to freely stream.