Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)

If there was one series I was not expecting to return it was Final Destination.  The original film was conceived as an X-Files episode and got expanded into a movie with the unique premise that, instead of the usual masked stalker in most slashers, the killer is Death.  Not a personification of Death with a robe and a scythe, but just the idea that Death does not like being cheated and will do whatever it takes to meet its quota.  It kind of makes for a universe in which the Grim Reaper has the tenacity of an I.R.S. agent. 

That has meant some big ups and downs for a series where the big bad killer manifests as wind.  The first film is okay, with the concept being better than the actual film, while Final Destination 2 manages to do something interesting as well as add in some humor.  By the time we get to Final Destination 5 we find that we have come full circle, with those events happening prior to the original film.  It's like closing a loop in the story and, in a series where the third and fourth movies were of questionable quality, ended everything on high note as it took some effort to hide the fact from the audience that it was actually a prequel. 

In the Final Destination films Death causes its victims to die by arranging a number of random circumstances in a way that causes it to happen.  The it has to do some cleaning up is certain people have visions before a major catastrophe happens.  If they take measures to prevent it then Death still comes to take his toll, killing off the survivors in the order they were meant to die, working its way to the one who had the vision as they are typically the last one to go.  The question in most of these is how to stop this inevitability.  What Final Destination: Bloodlines does is delve into that a bit more, although the answers won't really be satisfying for everyone.

Iris (Brec Bassinger) is a young girl in the 1960s who accompanies her boyfriend Paul (Max Lloyd-Jones) to the opening of the swanky Skyview Restaurant.  A series of accidents escalate, showing the eventual demise of almost everyone in the building before we meet Iris's granddaughter Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) in the present day.  She is having dreams of the disaster, but it turns out it never happened.  Iris had a vision of what was about to go down and managed to save everyone.  For decades she has been living off the grid with no contact with her family as Death slowly killed off everyone she saved that night.  Stefani's mother Darlene (Rya Kihlstedt) is out of the picture and her uncle Howard (Alex Zahara) refuses to talk about it.  Still, the dreams are causing issues in her personal life, and she looks for answers.

It turns out that so many people were spared that Death has had some catching up to do.  Most of the survivors went on to have families that they weren't supposed to.  When Iris is killed Stefani tries to tell the rest of the family that her grandmother was right all along.  At first she is met with misbelief but, with the one person preventing the rest of the family from dying gone, the others start dying in the order in which they were born.

While watching this my wife asked me a question about first responders and rescue crews as William John Bludworth (Tony Todd) turns up to remind everyone that messing with Death's plans can get messy.  There were some rumors that this would be touched on during this film, and I have to admit it's not really something I considered.  I reminded her (since she had never seen any of the other films) that the original didn't really take a lot of that into consideration other than to have Death be the villain.  I guess an answer is that medical, fire and police wouldn't be interfering with those that are on Death's list because they would be arriving after those who were supposed to die already had.  It might be interesting to see if this does become a part of some sequel if directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein decide to do another one, which is likely since this was quite successful both with audiences and critics. 

Logic aside the opening sequence is up there with the logging truck from the second film.  In fact, this has quite the same spirit as Final Destination 2, combining outrageously bloody kills with a sense of humor.  Where some of the others got predictable this one does throw a number of curveballs, although sometimes it gets a bit murky.  A number of illustrations form Iris's book on how to cheat Death show scenes from the other films which I thought hinted that the others were survivors of the same restaurant collapse that never happened, although the intention was to show that Iris had paid attention to the news reports in order to pick up on Death's methods.  It is also hinted that quite a number of the other survivors died on their own or illness or other accidents and not of violent Rube Goldberg-type events.

For the most part I enjoyed this due to those similarities to the better films in the series.  What I had a problem with, even though there were a good amount of practical effects used, was the CGI.  It seems like use, or misuse, of digital effects often kills whatever momentum a movie has going for it.  The green-screening in this looks like the worst of the D.C. movies and the tendency for many characters to go up in a cloud of pixilated blood ruins many of the scenes.  There is a scene with a falling piano that I thought was funny and satisfying on its own and did not need the added silliness of the victim exploding like a watermelon.  

Despite the unneeded computer enhancements this still takes some time to make the audience care for Stefani, her brother Charlie (Teo Briones) and the rest of the extended family.  A standout is Richard Harmon as Erik, a tattoo artist that once he realizes his cousin isn't nuts does what he can to help save his family, even if it is all the wrong things.  The directors do manage to make this more than a rote sequel.  I just hope that if they do any further films they dial back the silliness and stick with more scenes like Tony Todd's final monologue or those between family members that make the deaths effective.

Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)

Time: 110 minutes

Starring: Kaitlyn Santa Juana, Teo Briones, Rya Kihlstedt, Richard Harmon, Owen Patrick Joyner

Directors: Zach Lipovsky, Adam Stein