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Final Destination Bloodlines Doesn’t Innovate, But It Delivers

By Jesse Hassenger  |  May 13, 2025 | 12:00pm
Movies Reviews Final Destination
Final Destination Bloodlines Doesn’t Innovate, But It Delivers
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Unlike some resurrected turn-of-the-century horror franchises, like the recent Scream sequels or the upcoming I Know What You Did Last Summer reboot, Final Destinations Bloodlines does not revive any major characters from past movies, or even formally connect new ones to them by blood, despite its title. (It does bring back a minor one, and he steals the whole thing; more on that later.) But in their way, aren’t all Final Destination movies legacy sequels? They’re all connected by death’s grand, stupid design – the idea that if a tragic accident is halted by unusual means (say, a movie-starting and showstopping premonition), unseen forces will circle back and methodically check those saved lives off its vast list. It’s irresistibly absurd, with the built-in nag that maybe to call it absurd is to tempt fate yourself.

The earlier Final Destination films follow a fairly rigorous formula, which means that the tweaks of Bloodlines can feel like innovations instead of what they are: clever minor adjustments to the angle of approach. Each movie begins with an elaborate set piece where a point-of-view character glances nervously around some kind of public gathering, notices a number of slightly uncanny (or sometimes just comically outsized) details, and then witnesses a horrific large-scale accident unfold, ending with their gruesome death. At that moment, the protagonist jolts awake; they are alive, a few minutes before the impending disaster, having just experienced a detailed premonition. They panic, extricate themselves from the situation, and save some lives in the process just before the accident proceeds, otherwise exactly as predicted. This doesn’t spare the survivors, however. The rest of the movie – and typically these sequences take up a solid 10 or 15 minutes of concise 90-minute runtimes – is spent trying to escape death’s all-seeing purview.

Final Destination Bloodlines expands its vision by reaching further back in time, though directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein are not exactly surefooted in evoking a period outside of the franchise’s 2000s heyday. According to information revealed later in the picture, Iris (Brec Bassinger), the point-of-view heroine for a typically spectacular opening, should be experiencing the nightmarish collapse of a skyscraping restaurant about 50 years earlier, or around 1975. The fashions in this sequence, however, look more like the early 1960s, as does the house band performing a cover of the Isley Brothers’ song “Shout”; then, at one point, a radio plays Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising,” from 1969. No straight-up anachronisms, but many signs that 15 years’ worth of culture are being collapsed into a single, exceedingly fuzzy snapshot. I won’t even get into the age of the actor who plays a grown-up version of a character who would have been born no earlier than 1970 by this movie’s timeline.

Despite all of this, there’s novelty in this sequence, because it’s not focused so tightly on callow teenagers. Iris is a young adult, looking toward her future, and although she escapes one particularly horrifying fate, she still suffers major losses. Or so we’re left to presume; for once, the movie does not run the disaster back and show Iris escaping it, at least not right away. Instead, the vision of her possible demise has been haunting Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), who re-experiences it every time she falls asleep. This has been going on for months; at her wit’s end, she returns home from college to see if her family can help her unravel the mystery.

What she learns will not shock any regular Final Destination reviewers: Iris is Stefani’s grandmother, which makes her younger brother Charlie (Teo Briones), estranged mother Darlene (Rya Kihlstedt), and various other relatives (three cousins live nearby) targets for death’s extremely long to-do list, by virtue of owing their existence to Iris’s survival. (Apparently, death begins at conception, or possibly even earlier.) Leafing through a combination scrapbook, how-to guide, and madwoman’s notes that Iris has kept, it seems possible that previous entries’ accidents could be large-scale attempts to correct the generations’ worth of lives saved back in 1975 (or whenever), though the movie is surprisingly restrained about this it’s-all-connected synergy.

You’d think the sheer number of family members on that list would inspire death to take more garden-variety car-accident shortcuts, rather than sending an unlucky penny careening around the world. But the series continues its tradition of Rube Goldberg-style kills, often instigated by nothing more than a gentle breeze or a trickle of water. That is the measure by which Final Destination sequels must be judged, at their own insistence. Bloodlines flirts with something a little heavier by making the imperiled group more uniformly close and connected than a group of friends or strangers; the mourning following various gory demises should feel more pronounced and immediate. But Lipovsky and Stein never seem especially interested in that shift to familial destruction. The victims are a little sadder and a little angrier and slightly less garish than some of the series’ past cartoons; the way their bodies are mutilated, crushed, and splattered, however, remains glibly silly.

And within that realm, Final Destination Bloodlines does deliver. The elaborate opening set piece is one of the series’ best. Much gruesome fun is had with a heavily pierced individual, including a very funny fake-out. There’s even what may be the first-ever Final Destination background kill (or anyway, the set-up to one; the movie can’t resist going in for the close-up when the grim moment of truth arrives). The computerized gore still looks janky, but the filmmakers seem invested in getting there, in contrast with the weaker sequels that feel like they’re rushing to a pixelated, underwhelming payoff.

The journey becomes especially important when it feels increasingly like the Final Destination movies, despite their title, don’t have a satisfying endpoint in mind, even a temporary one. There are a limited number of strategies the characters can employ to dodge deaths, and Bloodlines doesn’t really come up with any new ones, just more minor variations. The most interesting new point of view comes from the only returning character: William Bludworth (Tony Todd), a coroner who knows the rules of death. In his final performance, one that seems to have been written and performed with the knowledge that the actor’s time was nearly up, Todd imparts some broader advice to another group of panicked young people, in a short scene of surprising grace – a lovely tribute to the gravity of this genre mainstay. With the unexpected emotional kick of this appearance, Todd literalizes what’s missing from these sequels: some kind of human presence that does more than panic and die, even if the latter is inevitable.

Directors: Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein
Writers: Guy Busic, Lori Evans Taylor, Jon Watts
Starring: Kaitlyn Santa Juana, Teo Briones, Richard Harmon, Anna Lore, Owen Patrick Joyner, Brec Bassinger, Rya Kihlstedt
Release Date: May 16, 2025

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on social media under the handle @rockmarooned.

 
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