FINAL DESTINATION BLOODLINES
2025
Directed by Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein
Written by John Watts, Gary Busick, and Lori Evans Taylor
For fourteen years Final Destination 5 was the final Final Destination—not to be confused with The Final Destination, which is just Final Destination 4—but eventually New Line Cinema was going to remember they had a horror name brand that wasn't currently making them, or rather Warner Bros., any money. As far as these things go, this franchise's relaunch is hardly the worst example of such things, and I can't offer any philosophically-persuasive reason why, so long as there are still humans who want to explore their fears of death through cinema, and ponder their anxieties about existing in mechanistic universe, that, following a suitable period of regeneration, and with new filmmakers having come up with new ideas for how Death shall come after its victims this time, they shouldn't keep making Final Destinations. Not that it would matter if I could. Rumblings of the series' comeback were heard as early as 2019, though perhaps it speaks well of the people in charge—amongst whom still number Craig Perry and Warren Zide, who've been good shepherds by horror franchise standards—that they were willing to spend six years getting the next Final Destination right. Whether they actually did is a subjective and kind-of-difficult question, that I'm not entirely settled on for myself, though the franchise's resurrection can't be accused of failing to find its audience, with its box office making it—by a substantial margin, even in constant dollars—the highest-grossing Final Destination.
I do have some dissatisfactions with the film, called Final Destination Bloodlines (thereby activating my mentally ill interest in the arbitrariness of movie title transcription conventions—it's Final Destination Bloodlines, but back in the day it was Hellraiser colon Bloodline? chaos). We're going to see that its team of scenarists, which somehow included MCU thrall Jon Watts (he also snagged a producer credit), have taken one of the quintessential horror phenomena of the 00s and absolutely made a Final Destination for the 20s out of it, which I obviously don't mean as a compliment, its three writers (Gary Busick and Lori Evans Taylor wrote the screenplay) seeming to have soaked up enough of the last ten years' thematic trends in horror that it was automatic that their Final Destination was going to be About Generational Trauma, though they named the film Bloodlines because at least that sounds cooler. Being a relaunch in the 20s, it's also as much about "legacy" as a Final Destination could be, which thankfully isn't very much, and at least in one narrow way it's good for it, as 2024 (Bloodlines' year of production) turned out to be the last possible year for the franchise's beloved "host" figure—we might use his in-universe name, William Bludworth, but we'd mean the actor playing him, Tony Todd—to make his customary cameo appearance, dispensing unsettling and menacing advice to Death's victims. There's something appropriate, even comforting in the face of death, that Todd, however visibly emaciated, deigned to make his final film appearance a Final Destination, even permitting his impending passing to become part of the story (Bludworth, too, is dying of cancer), without permitting his participation in this Final Destination to be any less of an atonal, bleakly comedic pleasure; I think we even have to admit the possibility that Busick and Evans Taylor have given Bludworth yet a third related-to-death-but-not-related-to-one-another profession as an actual joke. But then, it was also the last opportunity for a Final Destination to attach backstory to Bludworth, a joke character, who exists almost explicitly to ease the expositional strain of this franchise's esoteric premise, and to provide some measure of personality-by-proxy to its abstraction of a villain, and who only actually works (not flawlessly even then) because of the mysteriousness of his presentation. They seized this opportunity anyway, not sweating whether the backstory they give accords much with a character who's only ever been an excuse for the Final Destinations to express, aloud, their abiding attitude of smug malice.
Now, none of this could possibly concern you for the first nineteen minutes of this movie, because these first nineteen minutes are staggeringly good, even frustratingly good—for the movie will never, ever be better, and rarely will it come even appreciably close, so by far the balance of this Final Destination's 110 minutes (for in all ways is this "a Final Destination for the 20s," including its series-record, two-standard-deviations-away-from-the-mean runtime) shall be overshadowed by a sequence at the top of it that you increasingly realize is way better than the rest of it, though it's also so good that your heart would break to not give the movie it's in a pass. Well, I ought to tell you about it, and we're cast back, unusually enough, to 1969, where young lovers Iris (Brec Bassinger) and Paul (Max Lloyd-Jones) are out on a fancy date, the latter having finagled a reservation at the grand opening of a restaurant atop the new Sky View Tower, which I'd say is Vancouver's answer to the Space Needle, except that'd be the Vancouver Lookout, and while Bloodlines gratifyingly adheres to the series tradition of filming in Canada, big stretches of this particular part, for obvious reasons, were filmed essentially nowhere, amounting to the "worst" things about it, some could-be-confused-for-slop color grading and the accompanying weird mismatches between lighting conditions, tantamount to a small timewarp between the non-CGI daylight exteriors and the very-obviously-CGI purple eventide skies. That's "the worst things."
Paul is primed to propose; Iris wants to tell him she's pregnant; but she's also noticing all the little ways this feels like everything's about to go wrong, from the vertiginous horror cultivated by the human-hating designers of this tower, who have decided to make as many floors here as possible out of glass, to the camera direction and editing that refocuses our attention away from Iris and Paul's pleasing little romantic drama, and instead towards spectacularly well-chosen premonitory signs like fiery flambe pans and the atrocious shattering of the vitrified hard top of a creme brulee dessert, as well as towards the insane little sociopathic asshole of a kid (Noah Bromley) who stole a penny from the fountain outside and is presently trying to kill pedestrians with it in the square below, and the astonishing forcefulness of a soundtrack that, by the end of the opening sequence, will have deployed no fewer than five ironic pop songs—Bloodlines has one of the most robust music budgets in an age—especially a diegetic rendition of the Isley Brothers' "Shout" by the house band that turns out to have the perfect sonic structure to preface the multi-cause disaster we know is coming. And if I have resorted to not-technically-a-run-on-sentence to describe it all, then I hope that desperate breathlessness properly evokes the panic and the giddiness being husbanded here by directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein, even before anything's happened, this dizzying superposition of mordant seriousness and breezy black comedy that, despite its admirable storytelling clarity, is designed to absolutely overwhelm you with stimulus from all corners, from the intoxicating Space Age geometries to the feverish color grading the sunset backdrops afford (I fooled you, I actually like it) to the jagged cutting that excitedly surges towards the payoff of so many creative disaster film deaths. For disaster does ensue, with the glass dance floor collapsing out from under the revelers' feet, a giant gas explosion prompting what the movie's press would (credibly enough) have us believe set a record for the oldest stuntwoman to ever be set on fire, and ultimately the destruction of the entire Sky View and the people therein, including Iris and Paul, and definitely including that little asshole whose demise, related to his own purloined penny, is in its details one of the single biggest live-action cartoon laughs in this entire blackly comic franchise.
It's awfully distinctive structurally, too, because at the end of it, as far as we yet know, Iris is just dead; for when she, the next-to-last to die (the death of the last to die is certainly assured), is skewered upon the steel wreckage below, it is not Iris who wakes up, but Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), screaming in the middle of a math class in 202X, her college career on the verge of ruin because she's been having this same dream of death in 1969 for months. But I think it's worth belaboring just how distinctive these first nineteen minutes are: because it's Stefani and those attached to her who'll be this Final Destination's victims, this one's opening sequence has no obligation whatsoever to introduce those guys, only its own much smaller ensemble, and beyond that it has no obligation to re-do the scenario (at least right now) so that Iris can save everybody. So it's all-killer-no-filler in the best way, just Rube Goldberged Final Destination destruction for all nineteen of those glorious minutes. (It also necessarily exiles the title sequence out to the closing credits: it's an acceptable title sequence, taking that asshole kid's penny and doing a little schematic animation of it, as a synecdoche for Death, rolling along headlines and cutting its swathe through history.)
But now let's meet our actual protagonist Stefani, who is, of course, Iris's granddaughter, tasked with plumbing the mystery her recurring nightmare has laid out for her. She naturally goes to her dad (Tinpo Lee)—though he's only Iris's son-in-law, Stefani's mother Darlene (Rya Kihlstedt) having abandoned the family years before—and he only tells her not to bother her uncle Howard (Alex Zahara) or his kids, edgelordy tattoo artist Erik (Richard Harmon), vaguely airheaded Julia (Anna Lore), and dull, sensitive Bobby (Owen Patrick Joyner). Naturally, Stefani grabs her younger brother Charlie (Teo Briones) and immediately goes bothering their uncle and cousins, chiseling Iris's address out of her aunt (April Telek) when Howard refuses her. Stefani's next stop is her now-elderly grandmother (Gabrielle Rose, and it's perhaps a pity age makeup wasn't considered, as Bassinger will turn out to have given the film's best performance, practically in a different movie, and Rose is neither making an attempt to find continuity with her nor being remotely encouraged to, just Bludworth Lite). Soon, then, Stefani's arrived outside Iris's warrior of the wasteland survivalist bunker...
...aaaand right here, about thirty-five minutes in, is where Bloodlines, which has been on an acceptable glidepath, shits itself a bit, and it shall have a hard time recovering from the single worst-conceived act of production design of 2025, this wretchedly overcooked wilderness fastness that, for example, has a gate, with fucking spikes on it, to keep out Death, a cosmic being, which isn't considering numerous other details that are exactly as dumb. Just every single thing about it is unfit to its declared purpose, and of course that's not the fundamental problem, which is that Busick and Evans Taylor are not making so much as a token attempt to disguise what they're ripping off, and what they're ripping off was already somewhat stupid, namely Halloween's 2018 re-sequel thing, though even Laurie Strode's fortress made more sense, her defenses at least being arrayed against a physical adversary.
It triggers a lot of the same persnickety objections as Halloween (did this unemployable madwoman win the lottery or what?) and resolves others (but only if, against the movie never even implying this, you assume Iris was pregnant with twins, because it's otherwise just as nonsensical as Laurie of Earth-C having her kid). But we sure need her to have that kid, because of the aforementioned Generational Trauma throughline, which is expressed goofily with Iris ("seeing is believing" indeed, though what I see and believe is that you breached your CGI budget with the opening sequence), and expressed sincerely, or rather "sincerely," with Darlene, who winds her way back to her family for her mother's funeral, which becomes—this is probably the movie's only emotionally-astute part, though it seems accidental—a backyard party on the basis that nobody grieving her actually liked her, due to the Death-related compulsive disorder she passed on to her daughter. Narratively, it's inert bullcrap, partly because this simply isn't what Final Destinations are for (to the minimal extent these stories have morals, they ask you to be present in the here-and-now rather than look backwards), though it's not even that hard to imagine this Final Destination at least navigating its new territory better, either by way of centering an actual adult protagonist (which I'm sure was unimaginable to its makers) or at least by having Darlene present from the beginning, so that the drama doesn't have to be rendered wholly perfunctory in order to still fit into the tiny gaps between the death sequences and the supernatural mystery plot.
Or maybe just don't do it at all, though as far as the supernatural mystery we get goes, I do like the concept, separate and apart from the trite themes it services, regarding the saved lives at the Sky View who went on to be fruitful and multiply and produce whole lineages—bloodlines, as it were—who aren't meant to exist, allowing us to picture a very weary Death who's spent the last six decades ceaselessly snuffing out the thousands of unwanted lives ruining its design. Though we might also be able to picture a more interesting plot than Bloodlines'—I have inchoate visions of a period piece anthology, though I can't say how workable that could be—and I think we could easily picture a plot that didn't need to lean on the least-likeable concept of the entire franchise, the idiotic Kimberly Corman Exception established in Final Destination 2, but Bloodlines sure revolves to a perilous degree around flatlining. We could probably imagine that plot executed by characters with more interesting dynamics, too, but we get what amounts to exactly the same cast of horror movie twenteens that the franchise has always had. (Including one particular casting decision that's world-beatingly inapposite, if one of the convolutions of this plot is going to be that Harmon's character is not Howard's son, when he looks exactly, uncannily like the young, skinny version of Zahara.) It's nowhere near the series' worst cast, but there's maybe two scenes' worth of personality between the lot of them, and Erik and Bobby monopolize it; and, for all the half-assed insistence that this Final Destination has themes, they obviously only really exist to give Death material to work with.
So let's give Bloodlines this much: it retakes a great deal of ground with its death sequences, including the purest fake-out in the franchise*, with Erik in his tattoo parlor, which also has the benefit of being one of the franchise's most credible "freak accidents," as it involves an escalating series of missteps beginning with the alt-boy getting his nose ring mechanically linked to a ceiling fan (thus bringing in a light-touch but very mean-spirited social satire that I, at least, found funny). And on my first viewing, I'd have said that Christian Sebaldt's cinematography goes on autopilot after the opening—maybe even Lipovsky and Stein's direction—but that would've been unfair of me, and while full effort is only visible in the death sequences, it is a Final Destination after all, and Erik's sequence gives them and editor Sabrina Pitre a solid workout, bathed in tattoo parlor hell reds and always escalating in ways that find a beautiful balance between horror and comedy in high Final Destination style.
As for Sebaldt, he's responsible for some smart lensing in the film's funniest death sequence, Julia's, where paranoid Stefani cogitates, rather than precogitates, the exact contours of Death's potential trap, and, naturally, the implausible physics come off ludicrous and cartoonish when they're stated aloud (the script ever-so-gingerly attempts to establish that her mathematical skill makes her a Death savant, but so gingerly this is basically the end of it); it all comes true for Julia in a superbly out-of-focus background, while Stefani and the other principals stupidly argue in a driveway. It is, I regret, let down thereafter by the perceived need to draw it out towards a CGI gore effect that amounts to a mask floating on top of a puddle, arguably a series-worst CGI gore effect because even The Final Destination wasn't as proud of its substandard effects as these filmmakers seem to be of this one. Bobby's demise is likewise pretty CGI-mediated, but more credibly, and my qualms about the ridiculous liberties it takes with an MRI machine are at least slightly soothed by the meta fun it has with the ancillary death Bobby's death occasions, basically an in-film riff on a Final Destination poster. Plus I haven't yet mentioned the film's most all-round satisfying death sequence, Howard's, which is as pristine an example of the laws of physics arranging a fatal accident out of a host of self-organizing elements as the series has managed since the tanning salon death all the way back in 3, even throwing in a "misdirect" that only turns out to be the very first link in the inexorable causal chain.
The bad news is that Howard's is the first death sequence, so the series' tradition of tending to peak too damn early (and I'm not even counting the opening here!) continues into its third decade. The last "death sequence" is unworthy of the name, hypothetically attached to emotional stakes instead, but, obviously, it's not; the denouement depends on some pretty asinine rules lawyering, even more flatfooted than 2's, but at least it doesn't betray the series' ethos and I appreciate the scale and the cosmic cruelty of its bad penny always turning up. All told, I cannot reject Final Destination Bloodlines: it's not "a good movie," and it's committing the sin of trying too hard to convince you it is one, but if it's not "a good Final Destination movie," then the phrase has no meaning. As I believe the phrase does have meaning, there we are.
Score: 7/10
*Though this also means it exists solely for us in audienceland, which is frankly kind of horseshit?
No comments:
Post a Comment