Death stalks whole families now in the latest sequel to the long-running horror franchise. Here’s our Final Destination: Bloodlines review.
Like many franchises, the Final Destination films have not improved with every entry, with one notable exception. Final Destination 2’s opening disaster – a major road collision involving a lot of logs – gave many people nightmares, yet nothing in the following three sequels has managed to reach that tricky balance of terror and entertainment.
It hasn’t stopped Warner Bros and New Line Cinema from trying though.
Final Destination: Bloodlines hits cinemas 14 years after Final Destination 5, and to the new film’s credit, it does its best to breathe new life into a stagnant franchise.
The series’ staple opening disaster sequence turns out to be a recurring nightmare college student Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) suffers from. She quickly figures out, with a little help from her grandmother, that Death itself is haunting her entire family. Armed with her grandmother’s detailed research of Death and its ways, Stefani tried to stop the inevitable, but it’s easier said than done.
Initially, Final Destination: Bloodlines does a great job in balancing what works about the franchise with a concept that differs just enough from the previous films to make it feel a little fresh. That sense is strongest at the beginning of the film, but Bloodlines quickly then settles into old series habits and moves away from trying to offer audiences something new.
Still, the biggest mistake Bloodlines makes is mistaking excess for memorability. With each film, the Final Destination deaths have become more and more ridiculous as Death comes up with more and more complicated ways to take lives. Sometimes they hit the mark and you can laugh them off, sometimes they stretch our suspension of disbelief just a tad too much.
Bloodlines forgets that the best deaths in the series are the simple, brutal ones; Rory getting sliced into pieces by a wire in Final Destination 2, the sunbed one from Final Destination 3, and, perhaps the most unadorned and cruel of them all, poor Tod getting hanged in the shower in Final Destination. Here, directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein commit so much time to the build-up, the result rarely feels worth it.
Yet there’s plenty of potential here. The central concept of the film itself is a pretty fun one and Lipovsky and Stein aren’t afraid to have fun with the whole thing. Bloodlines can’t always find the balance between campy fun and ferocious violence, but it’s genuinely entertaining and best seen with a big crowd.
Then there’s Tony Todd. Todd has played William Bludworth in every Final Destination movie and Bloodlines marks the late actor’s final role. The appearance is a small one, but it gives more insight into Bludworth and why he has been such an essential part of the stories so far. It’s a brief but sweet goodbye.
Even with its flaws, Final Destination: Bloodlines feels like a breath of fresh air for a genre that’s been dominated by the rise of ‘elevated horror’. Like The Monkey, Bloodlines focuses on giving its audience a good time rather than focusing on themes and delivering a message.
Final Destination: Bloodlines eventually just does what most will expect it to, but little beyond that. There’s a sporting chance too that, if this one hits, we’ll be saying the same thing in a year or two.
Final Destination: Bloodlines is in UK cinemas 14th May.
And a second opinion…
