There’s no end of possibilities when the villain is Death itself.
I’m a sucker for the Final Destination movies. I couldn’t name three characters off the top off my head at gunpoint, but that’s hardly a deal breaker. I’m just here to watch people die in creative and gruesome ways, and sometimes I even pretend it matters if they deserve it.
Of course, deserve’s got nothing to do with it in the Final Destination universe. Death will not be cheated; he’ll get you in the end (I read Pratchett before Gaiman, so Death is male to me, but you do you). It’s the most existential of the big horror franchises, if perhaps not the most nihilistic. The fun is in seeing what happens before the final curtain, which is something we should all appreciate. Maybe not when it involves being julienned by a running lawnmower, but the principal still stands.
In this sixth instalment – the first since Final Destination 5 in 2011, which is an insane gap – our hapless heroine is uni student Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana). In the normal course of events here, she’d have some kind of psychic premonition about a massive catastrophe and save herself and her loved ones from it, only for them to randomly die one by one in a serious of bizarre and bloody accidents. Screenwriters Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor (with a story contribution from Spider-Man: Homecoming trilogy director Jon Watts) mix things up a bit by having her flash on a disaster that should have happened years ago – the spectacular collapse of a Seattle Space Needle-looking restaurant in 1969.
As it turns out, it was Stefani’s grandmother, Iris (Gabrielle Rose, with Brec Bassinger in the flashback sequences) who had a vision back in the day, she’s been pretty much hiding out from death ever since, as we see when Stefani tracks her down to her remote compound for a bit of an info dump. But Iris has cancer, which seems to have passed her visions onto Stefani. Look, the cosmology here has never made a whole lot of sense, but the gist is: death is coming for all of Iris’ descendants, now that she’s finally and messily dead (do deaths even count as spoilers in this series?).
From there we get what you expect from a Final Destination, and we get it in spades. I can’t imagine anyone goes into these things blind anymore – you know what you’re in for, and the only question is how well that expectation is met. Directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein (Freaks) know what they’re doing, and so we get a fun variety of intricate death sequences, as events conspire to send whatever poor bastard is at hand to their final.. well, you know.
We also get an appearance by Tony Todd as series mascot William Bludworth, a mortician who has been reliably on hand to dispense portentous wisdom since day one. His brief appearance here is more bittersweet for knowing it was the genre legend’s final screen role.
But that somber note doesn’t stop Final Destination: Bloodlines from being an absolute romp. Possibly a day will come when we as a culture grow tired of watching idiots get dismembered by the jaws of fate for our amusement. But it is not this day.
Final Destination: Bloodlines is streaming on HBO Max now.
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