Main cast: Kaitlyn Santa Juana (Stefani Reyes), Teo Briones (Charlie Reyes), Richard Harmon (Erik Campbell), Owen Patrick Joyner (Bobby Campbell), Rya Kihlstedt (Darlene Campbell), Anna Lore (Julia Campbell), Tinpo Lee (Marty Reyes), April Telek (Brenda Campbell), Alex Zahara (Howard Campbell), Gabrielle Rose (Iris Campbell), Max Lloyd-Jones (Paul Campbell), Brec Bassinger (Young Iris), and Tony Todd (William Bludworth)
Directors: Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein
Let’s be real: the Final Destination franchise has precisely one story.
The movies are like Mortal Kombat fatalities — just a parade of increasingly ridiculous ways to turn the human body into confetti. Once the novelty of the first film’s “Death’s elaborate Rube Goldberg murder machines” wore off, the sequels became a kind of horror-themed PowerPoint presentation titled “How Will They Die This Time?”
The fifth movie was meant to be a final send-off in the form of a blood-soaked mic drop. While it was still essentially Final Destination 1: The Slightly Fancier Deaths, the cast was likable, the story was fine, and it made for a pretty respectable series-ender. Until, of course, a studio executive looked at the numbers and said, “Hold my Starbucks, we can squeeze a few more outta this.”
So, we arrive at Final Destination: Bloodlines, a movie that boldly asks the question: “What if we did the exact same movie, but in the 1960s for five minutes, then returned to the usual nonsense?
Fans of the franchise know the drill — death montage, premonition, escapees, convoluted demises via rogue ceiling fans, flaming vodka, and errant nail guns. The formula’s older than Death himself at this point, but sure, let’s go through the motions.
Final Destination Bloodlines kicks off with its obligatory Everybody Dies Festival™, set at a 1960s high-rise restaurant called Skyview, perched atop a 500-foot skyscraper because apparently the Sixties were just Final Destination levels of dangerous on the daily. Naturally, someone’s on fire within five minutes, glass panes are decapitating people like it’s a piñata party, and the premonition-haver, Iris Campbell, yanks her fiancé Paul and makes a run for it.
Spoiler: Paul dies anyway, and Iris becomes a proto-Laurie Strode, living in a booby-trapped hermit house so rigged with potential death traps that you half-expect Kevin McCallister to pop out and shout, “That’s my move, lady!” Death, presumably watching from the shadows, probably figured he could just wait until she tripped on something and died.
Cut to modern times: Iris’s granddaughter, Stefani, starts seeing the same death visions, because trauma is hereditary and Death apparently keeps a family tree.
Iris, now terminally ill and just about done with it all, decides to end it all to demonstrate to her skeptical granddaughter Death’s design. She finally steps outside for the first time in decades and is instantly impaled on a weathervane. It’s not so much a plot twist as a public service announcement: “Never leave your house!”
This of course kickstarts the same old “Who’s Next?” routine, with Stefani and her brother Charlie as our bland-yet-likable leads. They’re about as memorable as a well-sanded block of wood, which, to be fair, is the series’ time-honored tradition. The supporting cast exists purely as human piñatas for Death’s latest batch of Looney Tunes murder traps.
The film does manage one genuinely poignant beat, courtesy of Tony Todd, who returns as the eternally creepy William Bludworth. In a touching bit of meta-tragedy, both character and actor are terminally ill, and Mr Todd’s brief monologue about savoring life’s every moment lands harder than any of the film’s actual deaths. It’s a classy farewell to a genre icon in a franchise otherwise built on neck-snapping and pool-drain dismemberments.
To the film’s credit, the 14-year gap since the last movie works in its favor. For a fresh audience unfamiliar with the series’ singular gimmick, this might almost feel new. As for returning fans, well, it’s like slipping into an old, blood-soaked pair of slippers. Comfortably predictable.
Is it a good movie? No. Is it better than The Final Destination (the fourth one)? Absolutely. But then again, a PowerPoint presentation about tax reforms would be better than The Final Destination. It sits in the same tier alongside parts two and three — the same old shtick lightly dressed up with a sprinkle of nostalgia and a dash of Tony Todd gravitas.
In short, it is what it is. If you come expecting a high-concept reinvention of the franchise, you’ll be sorely disappointed. But if you just want to watch people die in gloriously stupid, over-engineered ways while muttering “Oh come on!” every ten minutes, you’ll likely have a good time.
