'Final Destination 5' won't be the last

The Grim Reaper remains the Giddy Reaper in this fifth installment of the whimsically formulaic horror series, in which people who have escaped death in accidents soon meet their demises in elaborate, Rube Goldberg-like machinations.

Still finding ways to be inventive after four films since 2000, "Final Destination 5" opens, like the others, with a graphic premonition of disaster. Hapless paper salesman Sam (Nicholas D'Agosto) saves himself and seven co-workers on a bus to a company retreat when he envisions a bridge collapse that kills them all. In the movie's greatest set piece, a spectacularly lethal ballet of snapping cables, upheaved asphalt, scalding tar and flying metal rods is as perfectly, mesmerizingly synchronized as a Swiss watch.

Soon every whistling tea kettle and offhand comment seems poised to trigger some domino-

effect death. Pivotal screws and bolts shake loose all too efficiently from overhead equipment, vibrating cellphones get placed too close to lit candles on shelves, and water and electrical outlets shouldn't be within a hundred yards of each other.

The trick, which the filmmakers do well, is to give us character archetypes with enough personality not to bore us but not so much that their gruesome deaths affect us. So we have Sam's self-sacrificing girlfriend (Emma Bell), his friend and immediate supervisor (Miles Fisher), haughty rock chick (Jacqueline MacInnes Wood), stiff boss (David Koechner) and office jerk (P.J. Byrne).

After that, it's all in the execution, so to speak. In a treat for those who saw the first film, we see some plane tickets dated 2000 on a very particular flight -- suggesting Death's been doing this longer than we thought. And with this brisk, effective film, with very good 3-D, he'll likely be doing it again.