APRIL 29, 2025
GENRE: SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (ADVANCED SCREENING)
When a franchise takes a considerable amount of time off, the results are often lacking; the initial excitement for a new entry tends to quickly fade as the runtime proceeds. Friday the 13th was at its best when they were just cranking them out, and it took THREE attempts at reviving Saw for them to come up with something that excited the fans as much as the once-annual entries managed. But no one told the makers of Final Destination: Bloodlines, which comes a whopping 14 years after the 5th film and is every bit as good as that one - possibly even better.
The subtitle isn’t just the usual “Let’s avoid numbers so we can get newcomers” gimmick, I’m happy to report (spoilers for the basic plot ahead!*). As opposed to the standard “someone has a premonition, saves a half dozen or so people, and then they proceed to die anyway” setup, this time around we open in the 1960s, with the opening of a skyview restaurant (between this and Drop, these things are having a cinematic moment!). The usual thing happens: we focus on a single person (Iris, played by Brec Bassinger) who watches as everyone around her begins to die in spectacular ways after a disaster, only for her to wake up after being killed herself, seeing it’s all a vision. But it’s not the girl in the sequence that wakes up! Turns out it’s her granddaughter, Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), who has been repeatedly plagued by this dream for the past couple months, wreaking havoc on her peace of mind. So Stefani grills her family about her (long-estranged) grandma and finds out what happened at the restaurant: Irish actually saved EVERYONE all those years ago, and then spent a life being so careful that she actually managed to have children, and those children eventually grew up and had their own children… Being a Final Destination movie, you should be able to figure out what happens now: Death is after them all, because they never should have been born in the first place! Iris has spent decades avoiding his tricks and spawned two children, each with multiple children of their own, giving the movie its usual assortment of victims but with the added wrinkle of none of them escaping death the first time around. Stefani's attempts to tell them what's going to happen has no benefit of the doubt, because they didn't witness firsthand her ability to see the future as the main characters in the five previous films managed to have. This is a great concept for two reasons. One is despite the subtitle’s attempts to make us forget, this is “Final Destination 6” after all, and the formula definitely got a bit repetitive (this is one franchise I would never want to marathon), especially without any returning characters (except Bludworth, more on him soon) to latch ourselves onto. The other is that it means every character only dies once, avoiding the occasional issue where someone’s premonition death was more interesting/fun than their actual one later.
We also get a fun twist to the standard “order”, in that they are dying in the order they were born, complete with a “wait, we had it wrong!” twist. It’s just enough of a tweak to the formula to give the film a freshness that the last couple entries lacked. I mean, I really liked FD5 a lot, but it was the ending doing a lot of that heavy lifting, as the rest was kind of more of the same (albeit with an improvement in quality over the two previous entries). Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a complete departure; we still get the Rube Goldberg sequences, the misdirects, and the gore, but the family dynamic and “bloodline” concept makes it feel just as unique as the first one did 25 years ago, giving the series a shot in the arm that another standard entry couldn't have managed after so much time has passed.
And it actually pays tribute to the other entries in some fun ways. A brief reprisal of the “If you kill someone you get their time” idea from 5 produces what may be the darkest joke in the entire franchise, and there’s a pretty good gag invoking one of the series’ earlier accidents. But it should go without saying that the film’s Bludworth scene is the highlight for such things, because as we know Tony Todd passed away last year shortly after completing his work here, forcing us to say goodbye to him after he utters his final line (if he has any other films in the can, we can be assured they won't be given IMAX releases). The scene itself is not much different than his others (popping up halfway through to offer cryptic remarks about death, mainly), but the weight the scene carries, knowing the actor’s time ran out in reality, makes it a true knockout. I’m not afraid to admit I actually teared up a bit, and the scene ended with a thunderous applause at my screening.
The characters are also more fun than they’ve been in the last few. 3-5 all focused on a group of younger friends, and they weren’t all that memorable on their own (I honestly can barely tell the male leads of 4 and 5 apart), but the family dynamic means we get the widest age range that we’ve seen since FD2, and the way they play off each other is also unique to the series. The standout is Richard Harmon as Erik, who featured heavily in the film’s first trailer (the tattoo parlor scene) and gets the most laughs as the obligatory skeptic character. But the drama of this somewhat estranged family was also compelling enough to keep my attention in between the death scenes; there’s a brief bit where one just holds out a spare key to his distant/not-well-off sibling that I found so sweet, which isn’t something I can remember feeling in the five other movies.
And the deaths! You'd think by now they'd run out of ways to kill these people, but nope. Each one is unique and has some kind of added bonus to it, with a healthy mix of the standard Goldberg sequences and what I guess we can call "Terry Deaths", after the shocking/amazing bus death in the first one. I don't want to spoil much of the particulars, except to say that the trailers have NOT spoiled as much as you might think, and that the movie will have you fearing a certain medical procedure in the same way the last one made us all weary (wearier?) of LASIK surgery. And there's a funny bit that almost comes off as a meta joke about the series' calling card, and it plays so perfectly I actually wanted to rewind the movie in the theater to see it play out again. Haven't had that kind of reaction in ages.
Long story short, they made it worth the wait, and it stands among the series’ best while also finding the most successful way to stand apart from the others. Even though it runs longer than any other one, it never really felt like that to me, and the death scenes are all terrific. It’s funny without going into FD4’s ridiculous territory (which I admit I liked on my first go around, but found less appealing on rewatches), and gives us a core cast of characters who we don’t necessarily WANT to die. Kudos to the new creative team for finding that balance and maintaining it throughout. Hopefully it won’t take another decade plus for a 7th film, but if Todd’s death has them deciding to maybe let it end here, at least it’ll be on an inarguable high.
What say you?
*I actually got yelled at for telling someone where the opening accident occurred, which made me think of the time someone (else) yelled at me for the phrase “a woman dies” (the context otherwise completely removed) in my review of the 4th one. People take spoilers very seriously with this series, I guess.
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