I do not understand the Final Destination movies. I mean their appeal. I understand the movies themselves just fine. They are not very complicated.
In all of them, death is some kind of sentient, unseen being with a Rube Goldberg fetish who gets his invisible jollies from decapitating young people with seemingly innocuous objects like bowling balls and such. Weirdly, everyone in the films automatically genders the formless “death” as a man. No argument or anything, toxic masculinity does seem like a natural fit there, just something I noticed.
I noticed that because it is hard to pay attention or care about anything in these movies during the long stretches between watching horrific, meticulously intricate scenes of accidental carnage. Those are “fun,” insofar as laughing at mortality is one of the only ways we can stay sane in the face of it. But the Final Destination movies don’t really laugh at dying. Writer/director Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey is a great example of hyperbolic carnage used to actually mock death’s absurdity. Now that I think of it, because of The Monkey, Final Destination Bloodlines isn’t even the best Final Destination movie to come out this year.
There’s some kind of complicated franchise backstory this time. But if you remember anything from the previous movies other than plane crashes and tree-related fatalities, I’m going to guess you wrote one of them. Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) is a college student who has visions of a woman who dies in a building explosion/collapse because a kid threw a penny. Turns out that the woman was Stefani’s grandmother, and she didn’t actually die but would have if she didn’t have a vision of what was about to happen.
Because grandma saved the lives of everyone that day, death has been coming for them in the order they would have died. Why that order? Death has an organization fetish too, apparently. He orchestrates some chaotic way to murder everyone granny saved and then each of their offspring, who also shouldn’t exist according to death’s perspective, in order of their birth. Organization. Fetish.
Death cannot bring himself to skip a name on his list. That means so long as someone higher on the list is alive, everyone below gets to live. Stefani realizes this and tries to save as much of her family as she can from a series of gruesome fates. It does not go awesome.
Bloodlines never tops its first scene, which is a bummer. Set in a restaurant on something like Seattle’s Space Needle, the opening is a fantastic catastrophe. The rest of the film is a regular catastrophe. That’s a little mean, but only a little. And it’s okay because the movies are mean. They are mean with no real point.
In the Final Destination movies, nice people are offed in gross ways over and over again. This isn’t one of those therapeutic things where mean jerks die in CGI flesh explosions, giving us the kind of karmic satisfaction real life too often denies. Watching generally kind, normal people get exploded in extravagant ways doesn’t really add up to much. At least the way they do it.
The Monkey does the same thing, hurling murder at so many random and innocent people. But the narrative continually drives home the point of the absurdism. It is a macabre joke used to underscore that life is a roller coaster that absolutely for sure will one day go off the rails, so you’d best love the folks you love as hard as you can and enjoy what time you have. Final Destination is just “LOL, sucks to be you.”
The sliding scale that the franchise is judged by is the creativity and depiction of its complex deaths. In that way, Bloodlines is passable, but needed to lose a good half hour of people explaining what we all already know is happening. In every other way, the film is just another useless installment in a hollow series. Go watch The Monkey?
Grade = C-
Other Critical Voices to Consider
Audrey Fox at Looper says “Final Destination Bloodlines is a tremendous amount of fun, especially if you can see it in a theater (preferably with an audience willing to match its energy). I said that Final Destination offers no surprises, and yet this iteration of the concept is a pleasant one.”
Radheyan Simonpillai at The Guardian says “The most entertaining kills, which this time around involve everything from lawn tools to an MRI, have a Buster Keaton-esque flair for physical comedy. These sequences, along with the plot as a whole, tend to include little callbacks to the past: buses, barbecues, ceiling fans and logs make cameo appearances, thrilling little reminders of the havoc they can wreak in a Final Destination.”
Becca Johnson at Nerdspin says “Much of the dialogue is corny, and the last five minutes prove a little bit underdeveloped and tiresome. However, it proves itself as a worthy addition to the cult classic franchise, regardless of its shortcomings, as there is plenty in here to love. The deaths are cool and fresh, the characters fleshed out and likable, and whether the run-time is spent ending our characters’ lives, filling out the lore, paying homage to prior characters and kills, or developing our group of teens, it is always entertaining and time well spent.”