The Final Destination franchise is anything you want it to be. Its six not-so-varied variations of death engaging in a cruelly one-sided game of chess versus life make it a less verbosely existential version of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957). Sure, its primary concern may not be to decode the grand “design of death” like in the Bergman film; it’s to revel in its sadistically over-convoluted machinations. But, thematically speaking, these Final Destination films are very much concerned with — if not exploring, at least highlighting — the existential threat posed by impending death, made to feel all the more existentially chilling than the Bergman film (yes, seriously) because here it has no human(e) manifestation. It’s somewhat ridiculously supernatural, somewhat scarily natural, and somewhat a bit of both. Metatextually speaking (yes, seriously), it’s also about the violence of filmmaking (and watching), then: a darkly comedic variation on Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998) that highlights the inescapable control exerted by director and spectator alike on hapless characters trying to escape their pre-scripted realities.
All of this, of course, is bullshit. Or, at least, it sounds like bullshit because the Final Destination franchise, unlike Osgood Perkins’ tonally disastrous The Monkey (2025), gives diddly squat about existentialism. Well, maybe the first film, released in 2000 as a response of sorts to the post-postmodernism of the Scream franchise, did. But quickly, the franchise realized that having its disposable and boringly over-serious slasher film characters repeatedly talk about escaping the “design of death” was not existentially invigorating and was instead terminally tedious. The financial and artistic appeal of these films relied entirely on its Rube Goldberg-like set pieces that put the franchise not above any of the slasher franchises that it was competing with, but rather right in line with them; except, the possibility and expectation of ridiculous schlock doubled, tripled, and quadrupled here because the “design of death” hardly obeys any laws of physics or, well, human monstrosity. Death isn’t a Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers sneaking up to kill off love-making teens in the woods, nor is it Freddie Kruger, a surrealist entity killing off teenagers in their innocent dreams. In the Final Destination movies, it’s here, there, and everywhere — waiting for the characters to spill a drop of water, break a shard of glass, or be blatantly racist. And bam! A Buddha statue or ceiling fan will dutifully fall on their pretty little heads after, of course, they have already been electrocuted by [insert any] malfunctioning appliance.
Adam B. Stein & Zach Lipovsky, the directors of the latest Final Destination film, titled Final Destination Bloodlines, know this all too well. Their wickedly comedic sensibility matches the tonality of the franchise established by David R. Ellis’ Final Destination 2 — a flawed sequel to the very flawed Final Destination that, nonetheless, is responsible for pushing the franchise out of its sense of portentousness and into the realm of gross-out, ironic comedy. Bloodlines not only tips its (devilishly pointed) hat to Ellis’ film via specific callbacks — those killer logs, made infamous by that film’s impressively orchestrated highway pile-up sequence, make another killer appearance in Stein & Lipovsky’s film; in fact, this pretty much is a slightly more tonally uneven and plodding reimagining of Final Destination 2.
Its virtues are what the virtues of these Final Destination movies ought to be — that is, expertly over-orchestrated, ridiculously gory set pieces. Barring the hideously tacky and horribly titled The Final Destination (i.e., Final Destination 4), each of the Final Destination films features memorable instances of misdirection and dismemberment. And Bloodlines, unsurprisingly, delivers on that promise. Stein & Lipovsky are particularly adept at leaning into the perverse musicality of death. Two standout sequences in Bloodlines — one that takes place on the top floor of a hastily built concrete-and-glass “Skyview Tower,” and the other that takes place inside a garishly lit tattoo parlor — ramp up and diffuse the level of threat posed by practically every piece of furniture surrounding the characters to the beats of “Shout” by The Isley Brothers and “Without You” by Air Supply, respectively. It’s a bit like Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver, except, of course, much grislier and, crucially, still laugh-out-loud funny. Stein & Lipovsky consistently mine humor from all sorts of grotesque tragedies by repeatedly juxtaposing the cheesy cheeriness of the (almost intentionally unnatural) acting and upbeat music with close-up shots of these peoples’ heads and legs and arms being squished into Bolognese by MRI machines or lawnmowers; it’s a familiar technique used to satisfyingly gnarly effect, so no complaints!
The problem, however, is that these set pieces only make up 50% of the film’s runtime. Clocking in at 110 minutes, Bloodlines is the longest of the Final Destination films, by about 20 minutes. But it feels considerably longer still because Stein & Lipovsky spend every single one of those extra minutes on half-hearted world-building. Final Destination 3, 4, and 5 largely dispensed away with all this — for the lack of a better word — nonsense; this is the first time after FD2 that a Final Destination film has, very overtly, tried to explain and expand upon this franchise’s entirely senseless lore. And for no good reason: stopping the film dead in its tracks after each of its ridiculously over-the-top set pieces to explain how or why death is systematically targeting Iris Campbell’s (Brec Bassinger in flashback; Gabrielle Rose in the film’s present) children and grandchildren kills any sort of momentum these films live and, more importantly, die by! The intention — of all this schmaltzy melodrama between the Campbell brothers and sisters, their rote familial trauma, and worst of all, Tony Todd’s embarrassingly saccharine farewell — may have been to provide some pathos to the otherwise disposable characters populating all these movies. But that unconvincingly affected emotionality is entirely at odds with the franchise’s mean-spirited sense of gallows humor. Bloodlines works best, then, when it’s just another Final Destination movie. When it’s trying to be something, anything, more than that, the franchise’s entire appeal is snuffed out.
DIRECTORS: Adam B. Stein & Zach Lipovsky; CAST: Kaitlyn Santa Juana, Richard Harmon, Tony Todd, Brec Bassinger, Rya Kihlstedt; DISTRIBUTOR: Warner Bros. Pictures; IN THEATERS: May 16; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 50 min.
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