If you’ve ever owned Mouse Trap — the board game where players build and then set off a complicated, multi-faceted Rube Goldberg–ian device — you know that you play the game by its rules once or twice, and then after that you just build the mousetrap for its own sake. The Final Destination movies, with their Mouse Trap–ish modes of death, have created their own internal rules and lore, but they also understand that viewers mostly just want to skip all the dice-rolling and get right to the good stuff.
And there’s plenty of good stuff in Final Destination: Bloodlines, a sequel that appears crafted to be the final entry in this gory franchise. With its outlandish, ambient-yet-meticulously-orchestrated homicide DNA popping up in this spring’s The Monkey, it’s probably a good time to bring this series to a close. At the same time, Bloodlines reminds us of why these hilarious horrors have been such crowd-pleasers, and why their creators might never call it quits.
In addition to the big set pieces (including two that are destined to be the topic of conversation at piercing parlors for years to come), Bloodlines keeps viewers guessing. When there’s a backyard barbecue, what’s going to cause the catastrophe: the broken glass mixed into the ice? The blender? Jumbo Jenga blocks? The trampoline? It’s a testament to the manically paranoid Final Destination worldview that anything and everything, no matter how seemingly innocuous, suddenly looks dangerous and deadly.
We begin further back than any Final Destination has gone before, with a flashback to a mid-century marvel of a restaurant that resembles the Seattle Space Needle. Young lovers Iris (Brec Bassinger, TV’s Stargirl) and Paul (Max Lloyd-Jones) take the elevator to the top for dining and dancing – but then, on cue, one small action (courtesy of a literal “bad penny”) leads to another and then another, and before you know it, the whole place is on fire, and the glass dance floor is collapsing, and everyone is dying horribly. Except that this disaster is appearing as a vision to Iris, who’s able to get almost everyone to safety, thus defying death’s design. And death, as we have learned over the course of this series, will not be denied, leading to delayed catastrophe for all involved.
Iris’ fiery vision is now haunting her granddaughter Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), a college student who’s becoming so sleep-deprived that it’s affecting her scholarship. She goes home with questions, and after finally meeting the long-estranged Iris (played in the present day by Gabrielle Rose) who lives in a booby-trapped fortress reminiscent of Jamie Lee Curtis’ Michael Myers–proof bunker in the most recent iterations of Halloween, Stefanie realizes that death is coming for her and her family as the last surviving descendants of the people who were supposed to die in that restaurant. (The various titular lineages of everyone who survived that restaurant fire are a neat way to tie the whole franchise together retrospectively.)
There’s some discussion of Stefani and her brother Charlie (Teo Ribones, Wind River) being abandoned by their mother — who worried about passing along Iris’ excessive and all-consuming caution — and how Stefani is repeating the pattern by keeping her loved ones at arm’s length, but Final Destinations: Bloodlines isn’t here to create memorable characters; it’s here to kill them off in gloriously complicated ways, and it does. The screenplay from Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor finds consistently witty ways to dispatch its players, and directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein (and their talented VFX team) bring all those elaborate demises to vivid, if frequently cartoonish, life. The restaurant flashback is a wonderful mini–disaster movie in its own right, recalling 70s auteur Irwin Allen and his own adventures and infernos.
Bloodlines will have the distinction of being the last film of the late Tony Todd, a legendary presence in the horror genre whose involvement in any production lent it an air of legitimacy. It’s a moving sendoff for the series’ only recurring co-star, his off-screen illness informing his character’s place in the film’s fictional death lineage.
If this isn’t peak Final Destination — the second installment’s logging truck and its bracing tension will always be the stuff of quotidian freeway nightmares — its reworking of its own mythology provides a fitting and forceful wrap-up to this stage of its evolving narrative. For now, and until another installment takes shape, on-screen death seems to have been beaten at its own elaborate game.
Directors: Adam Stein & Zach Lipovsky
Screenwriters: Guy Busick & Lori Evans Taylor, based on characters created by Jeffrey Reddick
Cast: Kaitlyn Santa Juana, Teo Briones, Richard Harmon, Owen Patrick Joyner, Anna Lore, Rya Kihlstedt, Brec Bassinger, Tony Todd
Producers: Craig Perry, Sheila Hanahan Taylor, Jon Watts, Dianne McGunigle, Toby Emmerich
Executive producers: David Siegel, Warren Zide
Cinematographer: Christian Sebaldt
Production design: Rachel O’Toole
Editing: Sabrina Pitre
Music: Tim Wynn
Sound design: Thomas Jones, supervising sound editor; Jeremy Peirson, re-recording mixer, sound designer, supervising sound editor
Production companies: New Line Cinema, Practical Pictures, Freshman Year, Fireside Films
In English
121 minutes
