‘Final Destination: Bloodlines’ Review

Logging trucks, tanning beds, weight machines…

The ‘Final Destination’ franchise has always relished in taking relatively innocuous items, things you’ve seen a thousand times without thinking twice about, and making them the source of life and death anxieties. ‘Final Destination: Bloodlines’, the latest in the series, carries on that bloody, cartoonish legacy with glee. If you’re the type of person who already finds the world terrifying enough as is, maybe don’t see this movie.

Or do, I don’t know. I’m not your dad.

‘Final Destination: Bloodlines’ opens, as they all do, with extreme bloody chaos. A young couple, Iris and Paul (Brec Bassinger and Max Lloyd-Jones), is attending the grand opening of a fancy new Space Needle-esque restaurant that is opening five months ahead of schedule. As they enter the building and go up to the restaurant via a crowded elevator, Iris starts noticing things – a faulty elevator door, a champagne bottle being popped, a chef performing a table side flambé – of seemingly little consequence. But of course as the evening goes on, all of these minor details come together to make the restaurant into a death trap from which nobody escapes.

But as is necessary in a ‘Final Destination’ film, everybody survives this near death experience. Iris foresaw how everybody was going to die, and moved quickly to ensure that disaster is averted, thus setting Death on his quest to take back all of the lives that should have ended that day.

Fast forward to the present day, we are jarred by the screams of Iris’s granddaughter Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) as she wakes from a nightmare which includes all of the vivid details from her grandmother’s encounter with death in that restaurant fifty years ago. This sets Stefani on a journey to find her estranged grandmother, thus uncovering how Death has pursued her family with an unshakeable determination to take the lives it is owed. Stefani, her brother, and her cousins, are next on the list and have to work together to stave off Death’s revenge. But as you might expect, when Death itself is the adversary, it seems highly improbable that this family can survive intact. People are going to die.

And oh boy, do they die.

People are impaled and skewered and burnt and flattened.

They’re severed and smooshed and smeared and splattered.

Some of the deaths are sudden, others are the payoff of agonizing, slow builds with well crafted Rube Goldberg machines from Hell, in which a million tiny things come together just right to ensure maximum carnage. The blood and gore is cartoonish even as it has a visceral impact. Nobody who dies goes peacefully, they all go bloody and disgusting.

And that’s the point. The plot is silly, the characters are razor thin, the acting is unexceptional. Directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein understand that the only reasons to see a ‘Final Destination’ film are the ingenious kill sequences. Every insert shot demands your full attention, because any old item, no matter how mundane, could be the cause of pain and suffering that is equal parts hilarious and horrific.

This film delivers laughs and frights at a brisk pace, but that’s not to say there aren’t also moments of genuine emotion. Tony Todd appears as another survivor from that averted catastrophe fifty years prior, and Stefani tracks him down in a hospital to figure out if there is any way to avoid Death. Todd realizes that he will be next in line, but rather than respond with fear or grief, he tells this doomed family that we should all focus on enjoying the time that we have. When Tony Todd, a legendary actor and horror icon, took this role, he was already in the fight with stomach cancer that would ultimately take his life in November 2024. Released posthumously, this film is his last piece of acting, making his character and his message all the more poignant. If there is a message in these movies, it is the reminder that any little thing at any time could be what results in your death. No time is guaranteed.

We’re all going to die, but we can only hope that when we go, it’s much more pleasant than any of the characters in a ‘Final Destination’ film.

Final Destination: Bloodlines
Rated R for strong violent/grisly accidents, and language.
Running Time: 1 hour and 50 minutes

Director Zach Lipovsky, Adam Stein
Writers Guy Busick, Lori Evans Taylor
Stars Kaitlyn Santa Juana, Teo Briones, Richard Harmon, Owen Patrick Joyner, Anna Lore, Brec Bassinger, Tony Todd
Rating R
Running Time 110 Minutes
Genres Horror