Considering Hollyweird is (usually) all about making money and horror films are the most consistently profitable genre because they are typically inexpensive to make due to no big stars, low budgets, and decent box office, it's odd to realize that it's been 14 years since the last Final Destination movie - Final Destination 5 - which ended the run of five movies between 2000 and 2011 which featured an unstoppable "villain" in the form of Death itself and sometimes absolutely bonkers Rube Goldberg machine death scenes. (No one who's seen Final Destination 2 will ever drive behind a log hauler.) Well, Death is back from holiday with Final Destination Bloodlines, which takes the familiar dog and teaches it a few new tricks.
It opens with the traditional elaborate disaster premonition scene set in 1968 at the opening of the Sky View restaurant atop a tower which is meant to evoke Seattle's Space Needle. We meet young Iris Campbell (Brec Bassinger, Stargirl), who has been brought there by her boyfriend as a surprise and also to propose. No thanks to a bratty kid tossing the unluckiest penny ever off the open air observation deck, a wild chain reaction of events leads to the explosion and collapse of the tower, killing everyone including Iris.
Usually in the series, the person who foresees disaster then intervenes to halt things, but here we jump to Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) as she wakes up screaming in her college math class. Unable to sleep for the past two months as she's constantly tormented by the visions of the Sky View disaster, her grades have suffered to the point she's on academic probation, at risk of losing her scholarship. She believes the visions are related to her grandmother, so goes home to ask her father, Marty (Tinpo Lee), about grandma.
It's a sore point for him because his wife, Darlene (Rya Kihlstedt), Stefani and her brother Charlie's (Teo Briones) mother, had left the family when Stefani was 10 because of how Iris had raised her and Stefani's uncle Howard (Alex Zahara) and he forbids her to seek Grandma out. So she tries Uncle Howard who always waves her off because of how his mother had seemingly gone nuts over this premonition. However her aunt tips her as to where she could locate Iris.
Stefani goes to her place in the woods and finds it's a walled fortress that makes Laurie Strode's place in Halloween (2018, unreviewed, 5/10 - catch on cable/streaming) look like a city park. Old Iris (Gabrielle Rose), has been cheating Death by staying locked in there, never stepping outside, for years. She explains her premonition and we then see the usual prevention of disaster, but explains that Death will not be denied and not only has it been killing all the people who should've died that night, but also their descendants who never would've been born.
She's compiled a book full of scrawled notes and clippings documenting the past six decades of carnage, but Stefani refuses to believe the crazy until Iris, who now has terminal cancer, demonstrates by stepping out of her cabin and is promptly killed in spectacularly gory fashion. NOW Stefani believes! But when she tries to explain the theory to her family - that Death has been systematically reaping the survivors and descendants in order of when they died in the premonition then by order of birth, and that Uncle Howard and his four kids would be next followed by Darlene, Stefani and Charlie (spouses are exempt) - they think she's caught a case of the crazies until Howard is killed in a bizarre gardening accident.
When Darlene rolls into town in her Winnebago, her home now, for her brother's funeral, Stefani is naturally chilly to bad mom, but allows her to join the kids' ersatz Scooby Gang as they try to use Iris's book of clues to find a way to beat Death which leads them to recurring franchise character William Bludworth (Tony Todd, in his last performance before passing in December 2024, less than a year after filming) who is also dying of cancer. He explains that the only way to stop Death is to either kill and take the remaining years of the victim or die and they get revived. Attempts to do the latter go about as well as you'd expect.
I've been a casual fan of the Final Destination series since the beginning, really appreciating the whole Death conceit as an invisible force orchestrating ridiculous accidents as opposed to a Freddie or Jason or Leatherface with metal claws/machete/chainsaw. (No one cosplays as "Death from Final Destination.") But by the third entry, I found the setups too obviously telegraphed, and I think I skipped the 4th installment (The Final Destination). But the fifth film with its epic North Bay Bridge collapse sequence and the closing whammy revealing it was a pseudo-prequel to the first was a winner.
Though I own the other movies on Blu-ray, we didn't rewatch them ahead of Bloodlines, so I'd forgotten about some of the rules (like the kill to steal time one), but it's not important for this soft relaunch of the series. Overall, it's an OK entry in the series with a good amount of "OOOOOH!!!!" kill moments which if we're being honest is why we watch these movies. The unfamiliarity wish most of the cast helps keep the tension up because no one has the plot armor of being the Big Star.
The writers are an eclectic mix with Jon Watts, director of the MCU Spider-Man films, contributing to the story and Guy Busick, who's co-written the Scream series reboots as well as the above-average Ready Or Not (7/10) and Abigail (7/10), but it's not as elevated as those movies. Directorial team Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein step into the Big Leagues here and do well staging the action. Some of the visual effects are a bit obvious, but they're mostly good.
Final Destination Bloodlines grossed $280M on a $50M budget, so it's highly likely a sequel will be forthcoming sooner than 2039. As long as they can keep the quality up - storywise as well as inventive kills - Death is welcome to do his thing.
Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.
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