If the defining tone of the most successful “Final Destination” films can be boiled down to “unsettling, but silly,” Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein’s “Final Destination Bloodlines” maintains that balance as well as any installment before it.
Fourteen years after “Final Destination 5” supposedly brought the horror franchise full circle, Lipovsky and Stein skillfully expand its scope to accommodate an interconnected universe where Death steadily attempts to reclaim victims across multiple generations. While a canonically satisfying sendoff to the late Tony Todd’s William Bludworth bolsters the series’ morbid gravitas, a cast of playful, mostly likable 20-somethings keep proceedings light in juxtaposition to the filmmakers’ fiendishly inventive kills.
After awaking from recurrent visions in which her grandmother Iris (Brec Bassinger in the past, Gabrielle Rose in the present) dies during the opening of a 1960s Space Needle-type landmark, Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) leaves college to address the relentless insomnia that’s wrecking her stellar academic career. Stefani’s divorced parents discourage her from probing too deeply into their family’s troubled history for answers, but she locates her estranged grandmother and learns of a detailed conspiracy where Death itself has spent several decades picking off not just the people who survived the “Space Needle” disaster but their descendants and loved ones.
As unlikely as Iris’ doomsday scenario seems, Stefani quickly discovers that at least some of her grandmother’s theories are true, so the young woman enlists her brother, Charlie (Teo Briones), and cousins to combat the cosmic forces aligning to knock them all off. Yet even when she’s able to prevent disaster for one of her relatives, Stefani realizes that Death’s design is more elaborate — and patient — than she can anticipate, forcing her to undertake drastic measures to halt the deadly chain of events and save as many lives as possible, even if it comes at the cost of her own.
Because of the necessarily (and often literally) explosive incident that sets off each installment’s race against Death, the “Final Destination” movies have always been front-loaded. “Bloodlines” is no different: The bombastic “Space Needle” sequence, though not quite as relatably anxiety-inducing as the highway pileup in the second film, escalates to a crescendo that’s both inevitable and surprising. Where the film differs from its predecessors is in its characters’ early receipt of documented proof of the multigeneration-spanning network of lives lost — and possible methods for disrupting it — thanks to a bible of sorts that’s been constructed by Iris.
Having served as “Final Destination”’s on-screen historian since the 2000 original, Todd’s posthumous return as Bludworth offers both a tender tribute to the horror luminary and retroactive connective tissue between the franchise’s disparate chapters. Meanwhile, screenwriters Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor create one impishly dangerous situation after another for their characters while understanding that the films’ foundational misdirection (especially in terms of how each one will die) works best when the audience doesn’t have to suspend disbelief too much to buy each homicidal sequence of events.
If a few of the roles could have benefited from starrier casting (somebody like Meryl Streep as reclusive survivalist Iris would have brought the house down), Santa Juana serves as a sturdy, believable anchor for the doomed ensemble, and in particular Richard Harmon’s surprisingly thoughtful turn as Stefani’s over-pierced cousin Erik enhances an overall atmosphere of subverted expectations. But as with the strongest installments in the series, Lipovsky and Stein nimbly maintain an equitable balance between gut-wrenching and comically incredible, understanding that life-and-death stakes can (and with “Final Destination,” maybe must) be a little fun.
In an age of interconnected cinematic universes, it only took six films and 25 years to bring together this horror franchise — ironically, one where causality is a cornerstone of its mythology. Clever, unpredictable and fun, “Final Destination Bloodlines” offers the series a transfusion of creativity that virtually guarantees that it will live to kill again.
