Review: Final Destination Bloodlines

[The following review contains SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!]

The Final Destination franchise is horror at its most primal. Although the quality of its individual installments tends to be… inconsistent, to phrase it charitably, its overarching premise is near perfect, distilling the genre to its purest form. What, after all, could possibly be more universal than the fear of one’s own mortality? Death is inevitable and pervasive; it hunts us from the moment we’re born, surrounds us every hour of every day, and always vanquishes its prey eventually. Regardless of when you read this sentence, somebody—many people, in fact—will have taken their last breath by the time you reach the punctuation mark. Yet we constantly defy this fundamental truth of nature, stubbornly (albeit not unreasonably) clinging to life—or at least struggling (in vain) to find some semblance of meaning amidst the senseless tragedies that we regularly endure. And Final Destination depicts this innately human impulse—survival at any cost—in the most literal, blunt, extreme manner imaginable.

The latest entry in the series, Final Destination Bloodlines, continues this proud tradition, elaborating on the themes of its predecessors without feeling like a shallow regurgitation of old material (a common flaw in belated sequels); indeed, it frequently subverts and deconstructs the familiar tropes that fans have come to expect, to both dramatic and comedic effect. The previous movies, for example, featured gloriously deranged set pieces that resembled blood-soaked Rube Goldberg devices—precisely calibrated machines of slaughter that ranged from needlessly convoluted to outright absurd, replete with deviously sadistic bait-and-switches and hilariously abrupt anticlimaxes. Here, filmmakers Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein fully exploit that established foundation to generate maximum tension; their lens lingers on every potential threat, lending mundane, innocuous objects a sinister edge, thereby crafting a palpably ominous atmosphere. In one particularly suspenseful scene, our protagonists, having already witnessed plenty of incomprehensibly improbable carnage, briefly hesitate before navigating the perils of… an automated revolving door; in another, our heroine predicts an unlikely sequence of events that might culminate in a friend’s demise, and is so relieved upon apparently being proven wrong that she fails to notice the exact scenario that she described unfolding in the background of the shot mere seconds later (completely out-of-focus, to boot!)—the most deliciously unceremonious payoff in the history of cinema.

A word of caution: as I hope the above paragraphs have adequately conveyed, Final Destination Bloodlines is not for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach. The trademark opening premonition alone boasts multiple instances of defenestration, immolation, impalement, dismemberment (including an absolutely sick vertical bisection via malfunctioning elevator), and an especially gruesome degloving. It’s a deliberately confrontational introduction—an outrageously gory spectacle that immediately sets the tone for the story to follow, promising/warning that any subsequent violence will be equally graphic, excessive, and maximalist.

It serves its intended purpose with an almost unnerving degree of enthusiasm.

Gleefully grotesque, chillingly macabre, darkly humorous, refreshingly sincere (unlike Osgood Perkins’ gratingly irreverent The Monkey), and even surprisingly poignant on occasion (thanks in large part to the presence of the late, great Tony Todd—reprising his role as the no-longer-quite-so-enigmatic Bludworth—who contributes some much-needed gravitas to the narrative), Final Destination Bloodlines is a contender for the best chapter in the saga. I realize that probably sounds like a rather low bar to the uninitiated, but trust me: it’s very high praise.