Final Destination: Bloodlines Review: Silly, Bloody Rollercoaster Ride Delivers Franchise Highs

As legacy horror franchises attempt to worm their way back into the public imagination with largely unsatisfying reboot-sequel hybrids, bringing characters old and new together, alarm bells should have been ringing at the prospect of a new Final Destination. With the exception of the second movie, where Ali Larter’s protagonist returned to co-lead and gave a crash course on how to cheat death, continuity has been restricted to Tony Todd cameos, the franchise’s overarching premise so easily adaptable that it didn’t exactly need to exist in a shared universe. Of course it did––the twist ending to the fifth installment, which revealed we’d been watching a stealth prequel to the first all along, was the biggest reminder––but more so than any other slasher, here was a long-running series where any entry could successfully function as its own standalone beast. The idea of transforming the series into one more reverent towards its legacy, where the connective tissue between kills had to be taken seriously, would have made for a graver death than anything in the five films to date.

Mercifully, despite the involvement of new-to-the-franchise producer Jon Watts––who previously mined blockbuster nostalgia to billion-dollar success with Tom Holland’s Spider-Man trilogy––Final Destination: Bloodlines has little interest in regurgitating the past: even the cheeky nods to earlier set pieces (welcome back, logging truck!) are handled with the dark comic flippancy that has made this series unexpectedly stand the test of time. Purists may be irritated that the simplistic lore has expanded this time around so that the premonition curse has been passed down like a torch to an elderly survivor’s granddaughter, but I was still relieved that, posthumous Todd cameo aside, directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein have managed to avoid the various clichés we’ve come to expect from a reboot-sequel hybrid. Their movie is a delight because they understand Final Destination isn’t a cinematic universe anybody needs to hold in high regard; it’s a silly, bloody rollercoaster that reminded me why this series was such stupid fun in the first place.

Bloodlines‘ opening premonition takes place several decades earlier, when Iris Campbell (Brec Bassinger) attended the opening night of a Space Needle-style bar-restaurant with her husband-to-be. The deeper into the franchise we get, the more these extended set-ups become ZAZ-esque pastiches of over-the-top disaster movies; they’re all the better for it. Here that foreboding silliness begins long before we even take the elevator 400 feet in the air, our characters hearing Johnny Cash sing about walking into a burning ring of fire as they inch towards doom. What follows is the biggest, funniest bloodbath the franchise has ever put to screen: everything that could go wrong does, and the goriest, most ingenious kill of all is saved for the ten-year-old boy who seemed the sole survivor. Based on the spontaneous applause that erupted at my screening when this happened, Lipovsky and Stein might soon be able to credit themselves with making the most nihilistic crowd-pleaser in Hollywood history, as well as a high watermark set piece for the franchise thus far.

Moving back to the modern day, we discover that this massacre is a recurring nightmare for Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), the granddaughter of Iris, with whom her family has long stopped speaking. Her obsession with stopping that event, and charting the deaths from survivors in the years that followed, has made her a pariah, which is much to her liking. Now played by Gabrielle Rose, she’s spent the past 20 years living in a secluded forest home, attempting to avoid every deadly trap as the last survivor standing; that she lives in a home surrounded by various death traps to keep the outside world from entering is something you’ve just got to go with. As she’s recently been diagnosed with cancer, effectively cheating death by getting sent down through other means, the curse has unexpectedly passed to her offspring––none of whom should have ever been born, all of whom have lived their lives evading a fate they didn’t realize was awaiting them. They refuse to believe it at first, but when the elaborate household accidents start happening and the body count increases, the family realizes they have to work together to avoid fate.

Iris is a character obsessed with tracking brutal deaths, reverse-engineering which groups of people survived horrific events that never happened in her extensive notebook, but thankfully the movie never leans into this too hard. The narrative logic of each individual film already requires a healthy suspension of disbelief, and so tying them all together by one obsessed survivor is understandably disregarded; instead of legacy-sequel reverence, we’re just reminded this is a trick the grim reaper loves playing.

That simplicity is exactly why these movies have yet to go stale, despite extended gaps between entries managing to avoid becoming relics of an earlier age of teen horror. It gives the filmmakers an almost completely blank canvas to play with, finding new household items or mundane daily activities to build set pieces around; even though these are always tonally akin to genre parodies, more likely to trigger belly laughs than genuine scares, each is conceived with enough ingenuity to make sure audiences never look at certain items the same way again. Maybe the longest-lasting legacy of this franchise isn’t the films themselves so much as the way people ask, “Have you ever seen Final Destination?” whenever logging trucks, tanning beds, or trips to the dentist are mentioned in everyday conversation. MRI scanners, vending machines, and––yes!––Prince Albert piercings will all be added to that lineage this time around, and that’s just in the space of a single scene.

Another reason I’ll describe Final Destination: Bloodlines as a disaster movie pastiche instead of an outright horror comedy is because of its biggest weakness: no matter the brilliance of the comic timing, the splatter is undercut by a relance on CGI gore over anything practical. In an age when even the worst studio slop is beginning to pivot back to the art of prosthetics, the computer-generated carnage here would feel underwhelming if it weren’t for the nailing of comedic beats. The prior movies didn’t exactly utilize good, old-fashioned buckets of blood either, and there are scenes here which could only have been created with the aid of VFX artists, but when even some simpler deaths have largely been cobbled together in post, it does make it harder to recommend for horror fans in particular. I assume the filmmakers are hedging their bets on you being too busy laughing to care; at least for me, their gamble paid off in the moment.

Final Destination: Bloodlines opens in theaters on Friday, May 16.

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