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| Images Courtesy of New Line Cinema |
Some film franchises can get revived at strange times: Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors; either of Martin Campbell’s James Bond films, Mad Max: Fury Road, and Creed are just a few examples of this.
After 25 years, the Final Destination series gets such a revival with Final Destination: Bloodlines.
Nearly every aspect of the film has been improved over every previous one. The script and formula are more logical and funny, the kills fiercer and (sometimes) more realistic. The result is a relentlessly entertaining movie that rarely returns to the franchise’s cheaper tropes.
This sixth film in the franchise is poignant for fans since it was series regular and horror icon Tony Todd’s final film. Todd, who died from stomach cancer in November 2024, played a medical examiner to whom characters from most of the films came to for wisdom or advice. Bloodlines gives Todd’s character, William Bludworth, a backstory and a smidge of character development, something rarely seen for any character in the franchise.
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The way that Bludworth is used in this movie helps to ground the film more than the previous installments. This combines with some other thematic elements to add a little more depth to the film.
Protagonist Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) is haunted by a nightmare of her grandmother dying in a traumatizing disaster in a restaurant that sits atop a tall tower. This opening disaster is so well-orchestrated and tense that it rivals the iconic highway crash from Final Destination 2. Directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein are able to make this opening scene seem like something new, something that hasn’t been done five times before.
In order to fix this nightly nightmare, Stefani returns home from college to talk to family members, including her grandmother Iris, who’s secluded herself after surviving the restaurant tragedy. Stefani learns that Iris, like the protagonists from all the previous films, had a premonition of the restaurant disaster and was able to stop it. People were able to ‘cheat’ death, though the fun of these films is seeing how Death will come back for them in ridiculously convoluted ways.
What’s familiar about this film is a protagonist, in this case Stefani, trying to understand ‘Death’s design’ and figure out who is next. What’s new is making the game of cheating death a multi-generational problem and having a script that is smarter than all previous entries. What’s also new are some kills which are grounded and more realistically nightmarish.
But then there’s also the unrealistic, splatter-ific deaths that the franchise specializes in. The formula of a Rube Goldberg-esque sequence of events leading up to a kill is this series’ bread and butter. Bloodlines delivers this, but it also plays with your expectations, sometimes giving you something new.
Bloodlines’ also entertains by using so much more humor than the previous entries. A joyfully macabre soundtrack adds to this fun tone by complementing the death sequences they are played over.
The quality of this entry, and it’s opening weekend success, could mean more entries will follow. But, if not, this would be the perfect way to close out a franchise by making viewers squirm and laugh in equal amounts.
- Eric Beach