A funny thing happens once you conclude a Final Destination movie. You start to see the world differently. After I finished watching Bloodlines, the first new film in the franchise since 2011, I found myself elevated by creative paranoia. I was holding onto an empty aluminum can and thought, “What if placing this on the counter will create a chain of events that leads to disaster?” Then I was washing our kitchen sink and looking at how close other electrical devices were to the faucet spray. Then I began thinking of all the dog toys that could position themselves underfoot and cause me to hit my head against our tile, perhaps then having that aluminum can fall on my head as a finishing move. If you’ve ever seen one of these movies, they are games of misdirection and dramatic irony, anxiously anticipating that any little item will contribute to a Rube Goldberg-esque wave of death. In many ways, the franchise brings an outlandish fear home and makes you just as crazy as the doomed characters. Final Destination: Bloodlines is a return to form for a franchise that never should have been on the brink of death. As long as people can come up with clever deaths and misdirects, there should be sequels.
Having watched and enjoyed every Final Destination movie, I will readily admit that while each of the five previous entries can be gory good fun they cannot be described as great movies, and that’s okay. They are delivery systems for amusement and absurd deaths, asking the audience to try and guess the ridiculous series of events that will contribute to the demise of whomever fills the screen. It’s a reliable formula that can be replicated again and again, where death itself is the main villain, or star, and where the appeal of the franchise is the winking game the movies are knowingly playing with the viewers. We’re here for the over-the-top machinations and dark humor of trying to guess what combination will succeed. The later sequels were populated with repellent or powerfully bland characters that we happily awaited their fateful demise, but the deaths were also getting stale, becoming more mean-spirited or more flimsier in design, giving to obvious obliteration options and then cheap shock alternative as mini-twists. If you’re going to have a game, it’s better to play by your rules. That’s where things began to go sour with me, but that doesn’t mean good writers who fully understand this franchise cannot revive it. I just thought it would have taken less time considering the inherent rebooting potential at play.
This brings us to Bloodlines, by far the most ambitious of all Final Destination movies. It attempts to really explore the mythology and history of the franchise while also grounding the characters and their drama in a surprisingly emotionally resonant manner. I’m not saying anyone is going to confuse this movie with, say, Sophie’s Choice, but the filmmakers have put in the work to make us actually care about the doomed characters and their fledgling efforts for survival. Usually these movies follow a group of strangers along with a small friend group that becomes our core. This is the first movie where all of the characters in peril are family members across generations. Watching your mother or aunt or brother die horribly before your eyes and knowing that someone else in your family is next is just more impactful than if the relationships were based on high school friendships, work colleagues, or strangers. That kind of trauma just hits differently. Also, the ages of the family dynamic present a clear direction for the path that death is planning to take, going from oldest to youngest, although death seems to put this chronological pecking order on hold to wipe out a line of siblings. Excuse the math word problem setup of what will follow. Let’s say you have Oldest Child and Youngest Child and both have two kids but Oldest Child’s kids were both born after Youngest Child’s kids. Rather than killing the descendants in descending chronological order, death would wipe out Oldest Child’s offspring first even though they are younger than the children of Younger Child. As always, it appears death is a stickler with its rules.
The opening sequence is an all-timer for the franchise, and because it sets everything in motion I don’t feel like discussing it is particularly spoiler-y, but you may decide otherwise and can skip this paragraph. According to the new mythos, this is the event that sets the entire Final Destination universe into effect. It’s a spectacular disaster set in a high-rise restaurant 400 feet in the air atop one of those Sky Needle skyscrapers. The entire sequence is brilliantly executed and edited with extremely heightened periods of dread. These first ten minutes introduce us to a young romantic couple and get us invested enough to feel bad about what’s to eventually come. They also set up the stakes as well as the twisted gallows humor to follow. I loved tracing the different elements at play, from the cracking glass dance floor, to a loose chandelier shard (if one little chandelier piece could cause cracks then this must be the weakest floor in history), to a loose penny causing mayhem all because of a snotty little brat, the real villain of the franchise. The cross-cutting between the different incidents as things ratchet up is wonderful, and the clever cuts to the creme brule being broken as that glass dance floor is cracking is just superb. This is more than just a sequence in vertigo terror. There’s a gas explosion, a falling elevator, a Titanic-esque splitting of the restaurant, and the use of a grand piano as a slapstick coup de grace that left me cheering. This opener lets you know you’re in bloody good hands with Bloodlines and it also begins to emotionally ground the film too.
This is the most self-aware of the Final Destination movies but I think it works considering it’s the sixth entry, so having characters essentially be voices for the audience’s frantic clue-guessing is appropriate. One of the better sequences in the movie is when our protagonist, Stefanie (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), is walking through her neighborhood and trying to absently predict the everyday dangers on a garbage day. It begins as absurd and then it becomes even more absurd when everything she predicted lines up, though not as we might have expected. The whole thing plays out like a demented and extended joke setup with death as the punchline.
Thankfully, it doesn’t take long for the family to get on board with this crazy idea that death is after them, so the second half of the movie is more their scrambling to plot how to cheat death established by the previous movies by either dying and being brought back or by taking a life and getting that person’s remaining time. There’s a gasp-inducing joke where characters, after discussing these rules, glance at a maternity ward and consider, “Could we actually kill a baby?” before shaking away the dark idea and going back to their original plan. It’s self-aware without being overly meta, working through the rules and expectations but without an ironic detachment that can cheapen the enjoyment of the drama and thrills. That’s important because this might be the Final Destination movie with the lowest amount of deaths after the big opener. Part of that is because we’re setting the story decades after that establishing catastrophe, where death has been busy chopping away the survivors before coming back around to our core family (there’s got to be a mathematical formula here how long it took death to catch up). You’ll have to wait longer for some kills, and a few are just haphazardly thrown together, but there’s still plenty of dreadful squirm and rueful chuckles to be had.
Considering its runaway success at the box-office, out-grossing all of the previous Final Destination movies, I doubt we’ll have to wait anywhere close to another 14 years for more franchise mayhem. These movies are perfect vehicles for twisted entertainment when they have the right people calibrating them. They may not always be great but they can be consistently great fun, and under the right mindset, exactly what you need to wash away the blahs and laugh at the absurdity of death and fate. It will also make you re-examine your home decorative plan for your own pre-emptive protection. Feng shui or die, ya’ll.
Nate’s Grade: B
This review originally ran on Nate’s own review site Nathanzoebl. Check it out for hundreds of excellent reviews!