‘Final Destination: Bloodlines’ Review – Death Is Funnier Than Ever In A Decade-Later Return to Form

Arriving a decade after the last one and yet somehow right on time, Final Destination: Bloodlines is the gore-soaked antidote to a strain of self-serious art-house horror that was tedious when it began and has only become more naval-gazing since. Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein of Freaks fame have taken rebooting the franchise’s mythology as a personal challenge, and they’ve risen to it admirably, delivering the funniest, most emotionally layered, knowingly crowd-pleasing entry yet.

Since it has been a while, here’s the general idea. Virtually every movie in this series has operated in the same way. Someone has a premonition about an impending disaster of some elaborate variety – a plane crash, a highway pileup, an off-rails roller-coaster, and so on – that results in a lot of death. They then warn everyone at the last minute, thus “saving” themselves and usually a handful of their close friends and family. But Death in these movies is a wilful, vengeful force that doesn’t take kindly to being outsmarted, so it picks off everyone who “cheated” their fate in a particular sequence with a string of complicated Rube Goldberg-esque tragicomic accidents, each engineered with a watchmaker’s precision and a movie buff’s obsession with setup, subversion, and payoff. It’s Chekhov’s Gun on steroids.

Bloodlines embraces this formula while also messing with it at every turn. You can tell from a 60s-set opening that things are a little different. Our point-of-view character, Iris (Brec Bassinger, Titans), is escorted to the top of a perilous-looking restaurant built from glass into the crow’s nest of a skyscraper so teetering that the ground is barely visible from the top. Everything – the creaking joints of the steel supports, the cracking glass that forms the floor, the licking flames from a flambéing frying pan, a penny pitched from the tower’s observation deck – is an indicator of what’s to come. And what’s to come is, predictably, carnage.

But this isn’t a premonition in the traditional sense. It’s a recurring deathly dream being experienced by Iris’s granddaughter Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) in the present day, generations later. It was Iris’s flash-forward, now being re-experienced by a relative. The subtitle of Bloodlines becomes clear, but Death’s plot – and the very specific means by which it hopes to achieve it, by way of garden furniture and MRI machines – remains mysterious. The finer plot points are someone else’s to spoil, but know that they constitute a tweaking of the franchise’s formula that feels less like fan-service-y retread and more like the first time the film-making aptitude and level of technology have matched the premise’s demented ambition.

An ill-fated family assembles for one of several funerals in Final Destination: Bloodlines | Image via WarnerMedia

Don’t get me wrong, there is a whiff of nostalgia-baiting MCU-style crossovers and callbacks to Final Destination: Bloodlines. But instead of character cameos – aside from one obvious exception – we get recurring motifs from disasters past, like logging trucks, close calls in traffic, and untended barbecues. But these are knowing in-jokes more than recycled ideas. The deaths unique to this movie are mostly original in their thrilling ridiculousness, tormenting Stefani’s ill-fated family – including brother Charlie (Teo Briones), cousins Erik (The Night Agent‘s Richard Harmon, a standout) and Bobby (Owen Patrick Joyner), and estranged mother Darlene (Rya Kihlstedt, Bosch: Legacy) – with highly imaginative near-misses and eventual fates that are funny as they are horrifying.

I mentioned an “obvious exception” on the cameo front, obviously referring to the late Tony Todd, who briefly returns as William Bludworth for a bit of exposition and an improvised monologue that one can’t help but read as his own eulogy. It lands with surprising heft, but it isn’t the only scene like that. Overall, Bloodlines, thanks to the family dynamic, has much more emotional texture than previous movies in the franchise, and you’ll likely care about the fates of the characters much more than you’re typically inclined to. Needless to say, this only makes their inevitably messy demises even more striking.

And, let’s be frank, the messy demises remain the point of this franchise. Like Until Dawn, another recent horror flick that put entertainment first, Bloodlines wants its audience to have a riot, but unlike that movie, this one is so expertly engineered that it’s also a marvel of indulgently clever filmmaking. We have long been trained to regard every object the camera lingers on as a potential threat, long been dared to try and guess the exact sequence of Mouse Trap-like events that’ll prove fatal. That’s taken to a new level here, with even the dismissed red herrings from previous set-pieces showing up again in new and surprising forms. Whenever you relax a little and feel like you have it all figured out, that’s when it gets you. And it’s as enjoyable as it has ever been.