The Final Destination Franchise Comes Roaring Back to Life with the Rock-Solid Final Destination: Bloodlines
If you enjoy watching bodies get destroyed in colorful ways, boy have we got a movie for you!
I will always associate the Full Destination series with a very specific time in my life and the life of our country. I experienced the wonder and horror and wondrous horrror of Final Destination in its entirety not long after reality television bozo, sex criminal, felon and grifter Donald Trump was somehow re-elected president.
I was not pleased! Trump possesses certain characteristics that make him an unfortunate choice for the world’s most powerful man, such as being evil and insane. He’s also very stupid and stubborn, which aren’t admirable qualities for a Commander-in-Chief.
True, Trump was a popular host on a show where he famously told young people looking to him for employment, money, guidance, and mentorship, “You’re fired!” but the prospect of four more years of his buffoonery was not just harrowing: it was dispiriting. It threatened my will to live.
It was fucking bleak, y’all! I know what you’re probably saying: what about Making America Great Again? What about the incredible surge of national pride we experienced when our best friends Qatar (who we thankfully don’t have any major ideological differences with, unlike those monsters in Canada) gave US a 400 million dollar plane to turn into a truly tasteful and restrained Air Force One.
Rumor has it they are now pouring gold on top of gold on top of gold in a glorious display of All-American extravagance.
When Trump promised a new golden age, he was being literal! He’s on some old Goldfinger type shit!
I was worried that Trump would not do a good job as president and that he would surround himself with the craziest fucking pieces of shit in the world, absolute nightmares whose sole qualification was an an oft-stated belief that Joe Biden is responsible for all of the bad in the world and Donald Trump all the good.
We were so worried! But how bad could it actually be? It’s not like he was going to fill the cabinet with billionaires, Fox News personalities and Elon Musk, sneer at the concept of due process, defy courts trying to rein in his awful power, send people with brown skin to foreign prisons to rot under dubious charges, and embark on an insane tarriff-and-rage-fueled trade war that wrecked the global economy!
We underestimated his capacity for evil and stupidity, and stupidity-based evil.
The gothic darkness of the Final Destination franchise helped me forget the real-life darkness of a crazed ghoul becoming the most powerful man in the world all over again in a development downright apocalyptic in its implications.
Now, mere fourteen years after Final Destination 5 taught us all what true art looked like, the death-obsessed series has come roaring out of the crypt with a new batch of freak deaths, carnage, and corpse-strewn setpieces.
Final Destination: Bloodlines opens in 1968 at the grand opening of the Skyview Restaurant Tower. It’s one of those retro-futuristic eateries/dancers in the sky.
In the Final Destination universe, that can only mean one thing: we’re going to be treated to the sight of all of those revelers quite literally bringing the house down again and again and again.
What goes up must come down as violently and graphically as possible but if the uniquely cursed characters have a premonition of certain doom that allows them to avoid death—for a time.
Therein lies the rub: EVERYBODY dies. Oh, sure, they might cheat death a little, but eventually, they get it in the end.
A black band is playing “Shout”, a song that canonically has white people lose their goddamn mind. Since this is a death-a-palooza, that means that they lose their minds, then their heads, literally, and then their lives in messy and wildly excessive ways.
There’s something innately comic about how the filmmakers play with our expectations. The destruction of the dancers seems simultaneously due to dozens of revelers stomping as hard as they can, until the floor gives out, and a single coin slipping into the worst, most dangerous and deadly possible place.
It’s a barnburner of an opening that echoes Sinners’ conception of a soiree where people are having so much fun, and boogying so hard, that it somehow leads very directly to horrifying deaths.
You can’t have a good time these days without experiencing a horrifying death. Iris Campbell (played by Brecc Basinger as a young woman and Gabriel Rose as a death-haunted old lady) has the requisite premonition of doom, so she warns her fiancé, Paul (Max Lloyd-Jones), who has just proposed, of her dark vision.
The disaster is averted.
That’s good.
That’s also bad, because in this dark universe, the omnipresent threat of violent and gory death is, at best, postponed.
If a character is very wily and very resilient, death is held off for months, years, even decades. But if they’re the usual oblivious dumbass, then death is going to take them. It’s not going to be pretty, and it’s going to happen quickly.
In the present, Iris’ granddaughter Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) is haunted by visions of the Skyview Restaurant Tower disaster that never was. She’s afflicted with a second-hand, vicarious premonition of doom.
But what could it all mean?
Stefani then learns her family’s dark, inevitable secret: Crazy Granny alienated everyone with her fierce conviction that death has a plan for everyone and that you can cheat the Grim Reaper for a while, but he eventually gets what he wants.
She might be a survivor, but a big part of Iris died that awful, wonderful day in 1968 when she pissed off the abstract yet strangely concrete and specific concept of Death by not plummeting to a gory death alongside dozens of other revelers.
Iris has devoted the ensuing decades to an intense, never-ending struggle for survival that has taken nearly everything from her.
It’s honestly surprising and impressive that she was even able to start a family, considering that she seems to have devoted 90 percent of her time to obsessively chronicling Death’s design and sinister plans.
Iris shares her secret knowledge of destiny’s dark designs with her simpatico grandmdaughter shortly before getting impaled with a weather vane. Iris discovers that death doesn’t just want all of the people who would have died in 1968: it wants all of their offspring as well. What death wants, death gets, even if it takes a little time.
Grandma infected her daughter, Darlene, with what only appears to be delusions about her impending death and the deaths of her descendants. Darlene’s paranoia looks from the outside like a form of madness or, at the very least, a far-fetched conspiracy theory; instead, it turns out to be a gothic truth.
In her quest for answers, Darlene directs Stefani to a figure known as “JB,” who turns out to be Tony Todd’s William Bludsworth. We learn that he was supposed to die in 1968, but survived so that he could swap tips on evading Death’s icy grasp with Iris.
Todd was sick and dying when he made Final Destination Bloodlines. That’s true of his character as well. This affords Todd an opportunity to say goodbye to the role, franchise, and fans.
It’s not unlike how the Fast and the Furious movies said goodbye to Paul Walker in a way that was both satisfying and nonsensical, because Walker’s character is canonically still alive, we’ll never see him again for understandable reasons.
Todd embodied this franchise. His elegantly ominous presence lent the death-choked shenanigans an incongruous dignity. He’s so outsized and iconic that it's a little disappointing to learn that he’s a man who was saved from death while still a child, and not the actual Grim Reaper.
Of course, Final Destination is ultimately not about acting. It’s not about writing. It sure as shit isn’t about characterization or social commentary. The Final Destination movies are about the myriad colorful and graphic ways that the human body can be destroyed. The money shots and raison d’être are gory set-pieces where the characters meet grisly and creative ends.
On that level, Final Destination neither embarrasses nor distinguishes itself. The deaths have an unmistakable, unavoidable element of deja vu. It’s impossible not to repeat yourself when you assassinate so many luckless souls every outing.
Bloodlines is getting some of the best reviews of the series. It’s a one-franchise subgenre that combines horror, science fiction, disaster, and dark comedy, rooted in a unique and insane mythology.
I found Bloodlines to be a solid entry in the series. It lacks the campy self-awareness that distinguishes the stronger sequels, and its set pieces are strong but not particularly memorable, except for the opening bloodbath.
I suspect that other critics gave this unexpectedly strong reviews because they had low expectations for this glorious exercise in blood-splattered vulgarity. I hold these movies in high regard, as unassailable apogees of the art of cinema, so I couldn’t help but be just a little bit disappointed.
Three and a half stars out of five
I was surprised at how much I loved it. I’m not a huge fan of the series beyond 1 and 3 because they’re fairly straightforward — 2 and 4 are too goofy in a way that doesn’t work for me, and 5 just has a sub-The Office vibe that isn’t helped by having two actors who played minor characters in that show. I found FDB delightfully funny because of how much Looney Tunes-esque lunacy it features, from the premonition sequence to the garbage truck to the MRI, etc. (I’m not spoiling anything that hasn’t been mentioned in other reviews) It’s my favorite in the series because of its Drag Me To Hell vibes and, along with Freaky Tales and Sinners, one of my favorite movies of the year.