It’s been a quarter of a century since the debut of the Final Destination horror franchise. It’s been 16 years since we were told that the 2009 installment was The Final Destination… and then they just plowed right onto Final Destination 5 two years later, in 2011. And now, after the series has shared with us such nuggets of nihilistic wisdom as “there are no second chances,” herewith Final Destination: Bloodlines, the second third fourth fifth sixth compilation of gory dismemberments, bone-crunching crushings, squishy impalements, etc. This one was filmed for IMAX! All that brutal carnage on the biggest screen possible.
To be fair, this series about cheating death, though only briefly, has also constantly drilled into us — and sometimes into its doomed characters with literal drills — that there is no escaping fate. From the Grim Reaper and also, apparently, from its more-of-the-same sequels.
The very first movie debuted the moderately clever X-Files-esque notion that if somehow you evade certain doom — such as by getting off an airplane because you have a premonition that it will explode on takeoff, a disaster you then witness from the safety of the terminal — you are only living on borrowed time thence, because you were supposed to die and Joe Black has to keep his books balanced, or something. (In fact, the first movie was indeed spun out of a script originally intended for The X-Files.) So Death then comes for you via overly contrived Rube Goldberg–like machinations, all the better to tease the bloodthirsty audience by drawing human fleshly annihilation out for as long as possible. Rinse and repeat for every installment since.
Mostly in the earlier films, it has been hapless young people who’ve gotten caught in the Angel of Death’s crosshairs, so there is some slight innovation this time out from screenwriters Guy Busick, Lori Evans Taylor, and Jon Watts (Spider-Man: Homecoming), and directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein. They take us back to 1968, and a mass-casualty catastrophe narrowly avoided, again, thanks to a premonition… an event-that-wasn’t that 2020s college student Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) is now having post hoc nightmares about almost 60 years on. Some Nancy Drew–ing later, Stefani discovers that her grandmother, Iris (Brec Bassinger in 1968, Gabrielle Rose [The BFG, Hector and the Search for Happiness] today), is the one who had the horrific vision and saved everyone, and so now ol’ Grim is coming not only for Iris and at least one other cheater of hippie-era death but also Iris’s descendants, who should never have been born… which puts Stefani’s 50something mom (Rya Kihlstedt: Deep Impact) and maternal uncle (Alex Zahara: 2012) in the frame, as well as her brother and their young-ish cousins. (Ironic? Mom and Uncle are GenXers, just like the first targets of this franchise’s slaughter. Maybe the universe just hates my generation? Totally plausible.)
Why ol’ Grim didn’t cull anyone immediately after the 1968 noncalamity will be examined, and it will be strictly in line with the “rules” the series has previously laid out, which are honestly not that intriguing or enlightening on an existential level, or even a been-there-done-that-already movie level. The simplistic dorm-room philosophy of the Final Destination movies advances not one bit here; we’re still, a quarter of a century on, pondering how wild it is that we all die at some point, and how fragile our meatbag bodies are. Whatever OCD-adjacent terror/pleasure exists in the notion that danger lurks everywhere — leafblowers! vending machines! weather vanes! — has long since been covered. Much more potentially fictionally interesting are the questions that are not asked: Who is responsible for sending folks those premonitions? Is there an adversary to Death who is trying to start some shit? Or are we all playthings of cold destiny on both sides of the equation?
Mostly, though: I dunno, man, maybe I’m getting too old for this shit. Maybe I always was. The last time we got one of these movies, about easily breakable people getting killed in “funny,” “inventive” ways, social media didn’t exist, at least not like it does today, and we weren’t watching babies in Gaza get ripped in two on TikTok and Twitter. I’d like to think a movie like this was a lot more amusing and diverting a decade-plus ago, except there was an awful lot of laughter in my advance screening for critics (very few) and “influencers” (mostly) in the year of an absent god 2025.
I’d have loved to have heard, 25 years ago, the exhausted, despairing snark Fox Mulder would have had for this, and even moreso now.
more films like this:
• Stand by Me [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | Max US]
• This Is the End [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV]
Quarter of a cent…Okay, now I feel old.
Right? Time is a trickster.