‘Final Destination: Bloodlines’ Movie Review: Death Is A Clever Girl Again In Gleefully Ghoulish Sixth Entry
Photo from IMDb
From Jeremy Kibler
Death is back, baby, and this time, he’s interested in family and introducing the world to even more everyday fears. After 2011’s Final Destination 5 surprised us all in the last few minutes by revealing itself to be a sneaky prequel to 2000’s Final Destination, it seemed like the series really did reach its final destination.
Doing all of us fans right, directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein still manage to subvert expectations again and again with a ghoulishly playful, cleverly engineered exploitation crowd-pleaser. The Grim Reaper hasn’t lost its healthy sense of humor to go with the gory, mischievously delivered carnage, and that enough care and thought have been put into the sixth entry in a horror series is a win in itself.
College student Stefani’s (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) has been having a recurring nightmare of a catastrophe from the point of view of Iris (an instantly likable and sympathetic Brec Bassinger), Stefani’s estranged grandmother when she was younger. When she returns home to gain more information, Stefani learns that Grandma Iris’ premonition saved hundreds of people who would later go on to die in freak accidents. This curse now haunts Stefani and the rest of her family once the matriarch goes, but she might know how to stop it.
A Final Destination movie is only as strong as its opening set-piece, especially when following an airplane explosion, a freeway accident, a roller coaster mishap, a racetrack crash, and a bridge collapse. The one here set in the 1960s at the grand opening of a high-rise restaurant is pretty spectacular. (Between Drop and this, Space Needle-type restaurants are a big thing this year.) Though CG enhancements are clearly part of the craft in this vertiginous stunt, it’s as nerve-shredding, suspenseful, sharply edited, and frightening as it needs to be with plenty of gallows-humored payoffs. The timing of Burt Bacharach’s “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” being played is so wrong but so right.
Kaitlyn Santa Juana makes for a strong anchor as Stefani, and everything involving her broken family—mother Darlene (Rya Kihlstedt) left her and her brother Charlie (Leo Briones) when they were young—gives this material some emotional heft. The rest of the cast gives their all, particularly Richard Harmon and Owen Patrick Joyner as polar-opposite brothers Erik and Bobby who practically have death nailed on their foreheads by respectively working at a tattoo/piercing parlor and having a severe peanut allergy. The late Tony Todd, as this series’ harbinger/coroner, also gets a lovely send-off.
The script by Gus Busick & Lori Evans Taylor is forced to get in a few too many exposition dumps, but that’s par for the course of a Final Destination movie for characters to all be on the same page. Expository Grandma at least gets to be played with a no-bull sense of humor and resiliency by Gabrielle Rose to offset the Crazy Old Bat cliché, although her heavily armed compound of a cabin looks more like a giant death trap than a safe house (Laurie Strode should have taken notes).
The family element ensures that we care more about these characters than we ordinarily do. Somehow, the relationships and histories between no less than eight characters are efficiently established before Stefani’s cousins start dying in elaborately gruesome fashion. Of course, those Rube Goldberg-designed kills have and will always be the bread and butter, and the order in which they go down still surprises.
Weather vanes, trash trucks, ice wells, lawnmowers, trampolines, and MRI machines, all of these everyday objects are now associated with danger that will leave audiences avoiding at all costs. Once-innocent family barbecues will also just never be the same.
Final Destination: Bloodlines is gleefully demented fun. Strangely enough, it feels good to be in Death’s hands again.
Rating: 3.5/5
Final Destination: Bloodlines hits theaters on May 16, 2024.
