‘Final Destination: Bloodlines’ REVIEW: Towering Rebirth
‘Final Destination: Bloodlines’ REVIEW: Towering Rebirth
A foreboding skeleton figure at a tattoo parlor || Still courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
Oh, Final Destination, the ol’ reliable new fear generator.
The series that has given us several intrusive thoughts of bodily annihilation while driving behind log trucks and getting our footwear stuck on escalators has been long engraved in horror canon for its consistently reliable premise. A lot of criticism has been heaped on this reliance on formula and repetition, even if there is a certain longevity in the template of seeing a group of individuals escape certain death due to one person receiving a premonition of an accident and pissing the concept of Death (with proper nouns, it’s that present in spirit) off enough to have them die afterward through convoluted, Rube Goldberg-esque brutality.
It’s perhaps one of the more striking mainstream horror franchises out there in terms of pushing the tropes of the slasher to the most abstract (where it isn’t a tangible being that causes violence, but the innate mechanics of death itself), and more primally, the imaginative “accidents” that the Grim Reaper has cooked up.
In spite of its box office success throughout the 2000s and into the early 2010s, grossing a total of 600 million dollars in the box office, we haven’t had a mainline entry in the franchise since 2011’s Final Destination 5. There had been an active effort since 2019 to get something going, first conceptualizing a plot centered around first responders with Saw sequel writers Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan in tow. After numerous delays (due to the COVID-19 pandemic and SAG-AFTRA strikes) and finding several key members such as producer and story consultation Jon Watts (Clown, MCU Spider-Man trilogy), scriptwriters Guy Busick (Ready or Not, Abigail) and Lori Evans Taylor (Bed Rest, Cellar Door), and directors Adam Stein and Zach Lipovsky (Freaks, Kim Possible), Final Destination Bloodlines has finally arrived, and it shows in the final product that the series is ecstatic to be back in business.
Bloodlines takes a slightly diverging path in how it progresses compared to the five prior films. While it does kick things off with a wide, destructive set piece, the framing is a bit different. Here, it is college student Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) who receives visions of a harrowing tower restaurant collapse that her grandmother Iris Campbell (Brec Bassinger) was a part of decades prior (with what fully occurred on the day serving as a sort of prologue to the main plot). With these repeated gory nightmares taking a toll on her, she makes an effort to find her long-estranged grandmother for answers. In doing so, Stefani unveils a decades-long hidden truth that has haunted the Campbell-Reyes lineage for years: Iris herself had a premonition of that same tower collapse, saving numerous lives in the process, and Death has been gradually haunting each and every survivor and their lineage for decades. Now, it’s Iris’ bloodline’s turn on the chopping block.
The Opening Skyscraper Explosion in Final Destination: Bloodlines || Still courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
The Final Destination franchise is not particularly known for having the most writerly scripts out there — and they don’t have to. They just have to focus on the deaths and the right amount of lore logistics to form the backbone of the plot. This approach does help in terms of their leanness, with the previous five films barely going over the 90-minute mark. But at their best (which, for my money, goes to 3 and 5), they balance the fatalistic nastiness with a layer of depth and cleverness to create an immediate attachment to those poor victims, supposed predictability be damned.
In that regard, Bloodlines is perhaps the most transparent attempt at decorating the blood-stained conveyor belt approach with tangential, yet vital, screenwriting detail. Interpersonal histories get touched upon as the story’s driving factor, characters receive some agency while being quite sympathetic thanks to the aspect of familial bonds (and in some cases, even having shades of a whole developmental arc), and there are more wide-reaching lore implications about the scope of Death’s plan to tie the series together.
All three of these points come together in the oft-prerequisite scene featuring William Bludworth (the late great Tony Todd), where the expected marking of exposition humanizes a once-enigmatic figure. With his passing after the filming of his scenes, his final lines requested to be ad libbed in order to say whatever he wanted for the fans watching — made for a rather emotional farewell to the series’ most recurring cast member.
If you think all of this seems a bit too earnest or idealistic for comfort, well do not fret, because all of these additions are in service for perhaps the one of the more pointedly mean-spirited directions the series has taken yet, willing to undermine many a genuine moment for the sake of bloodshed and perpetuating the ever-present feeling of hopelessness. It’s not done with po-faced dourness either; Bloodlines is also the most transparent the series has in intentionally attempting pitch-black comedy, having twisted self-awareness of its main conceit. The humor doesn’t come from a direction of minimizing or punching down on its own plot nor the genuine emotions of its cast, instead it comes from just how incredibly difficult and unfeasible it actually is to outlast an omniscient being with a mean streak that could kill you in the most seemingly far-fetched manner, in spite of the veneer of set “rules”.
Bobby (Owen Patrick Joyner) stands transfixed by an activating MRI machine in Final Destination: Bloodlines || Still courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
The dynamic the potential victims take against their fate feel more like attempting to win a rigged chess game against someone who already knows their moves prior hand compared to the desperate scrambles of previous groups, making the movie’s twists feel even more satisfyingly sadistic. The last act does fall into the usual Final Destination habits, which depending on one’s tolerance of the formula, might give long-time viewers a sense of twisted nostalgia, or peeve those looking for something wholly subversive. Still, as a whole, some of the writing here is surprisingly some of the strongest in the franchise as a whole in spite of it not being the most complex, and it's only potential hole, its ending, being a consistent weakness of a number of its predecessors.
But of course, a Final Destination film would be nothing without the kills, and in that regard, Bloodlines still provides a lot of gory wonders. Executing the now-trademarked artful technique of buildup, fakeout, and escalation while carving space for numerous physical comedic gags, there’s a plethora of nasty body horror that will satisfy gorehounds while keeping them guessing. The inciting incident on the Skyview Restaurant Tower that occurs during the prologue is an example of the film’s brand of pure undistilled chaos, which would certainly unnerve those with a drastic fear of heights.
There is one slight tangible disappointment with the gore aspect though, and it is their tangibility. The first 3 Final Destination films mixed digital and practical effects in a way that added to the immediacy and ‘squish’ to the impact, with the repeated help of green screen and the destruction of dummies and prop vehicles. The two films afterwards remained steadfast in that mixture, but the digital sheen of the time period they were made in unfortunately nulls a portion of said impact, due to a disbalanced reliance on CGI, and Bloodlines does inherit that imbalance, especially in its more grander-scaled kills. Not to say it looks too cheap-looking, but it does deweight the series’ main appeal a bit.
Detailed notes describing the intricacies of how a truck might kill people in Final Destination: Bloodlines || Still courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
Stein and Lipovsky do well behind the camera in imbuing the tension and paranoia that comes with thinking that every object and every place is a source of death. Though the processing of the visual form is reminiscent of 5’s in its blockbuster-esque look and (for the most part) grounded palette, it has a certain jitteriness in the mundanity - including the use of dutch angles to create a sense of vertigo and a unnaturally bright sun in the Skyview prologue to emphasize the dreamy aspect - that heightens the somewhat slapstick tone the movie leans into.
When the deaths occur, they are cut through rapidly heightening momentum, stacking absurdities along with the suspense, and precise timing that they feel like neatly crafted practical jokes. Within series terms, the direction feels more indebted to David Ellis’ bombastic entries (2 and The (4th one)) than James Wong’s atmospheric ones (the first movie and 3). Though on an aspect the former’s entries are inconsistent at, the performances here are perhaps the strongest across the board in the franchise in accordance with the unexpected step up of the script. Standout performances (aside from the aforementioned Todd) include Kaitlyn Santa Juana as the film’s anchor trying to hold together in the midst of all the madness and at the same time trying to reconnect with her immediate family, Gabrielle Rose as an older, more frazzled Iris Campbell whose wide knowledge of Death’s plans belies an aching trauma that spreads through the people she wants to protect, and Richard Harmon, who plays a character that initially reads as the archetypal jerk with hilarious enthusiasm before growing into unexpected but welcome dimensions.
Final Destination Bloodlines is a gleeful return to the anarchic ultraviolence that is the franchise’s raison d'etre, giving you what you’d expect in subtly different, yet all the more tense and outrageous manner. It imbues its anxiety-fueled carnage with a colorful cast, a plot that plays a bit with progression, and with such a hilariously unhinged outlook that it sails by some of the more visual and story-based unwieldiness on the basis of giving faithfuls and potential newcomers a suspensefully glorious show. This may go down as one of the year’s pure sicko popcorn features and a towering rebirth to an assumed long-gone movie series. Packed crowd highly recommended.
Final Destination Bloodlines is now showing in Philippine cinemas through Warner Bros. Pictures.
