By Let’s make one thing clear – in the grand tapestry of horror, the Final Destination series is all about killing people in fun and over-the-top ways. It’s an evolution of the slasher genre, but instead of having its cast fear a single person stalking them and killing them in brutal ways, they’re more afraid of the concept of death and its grand design. Despite never appearing as a personified character, Death is stalking everyone who somehow evaded its grand design, and now it’s trying to rectify that. It’s been true since the original 2000 film, and it’s true in Final Destination Bloodlines.
However, throughout the 2000s, the franchise began to lose a lot of that ingenuity. With five movies coming out over the course of 11 years, audiences grew numb to the senseless killings. Sure, they were inventive kills, but that’s all that Final Destination had going for it. Now, 14 years removed from the last entry, Final Destination Bloodlines does feel like a return to form. While a lot of horror movies today are elevating the genre, going back to a loony slasher film with cartoonish deaths is refreshing. It does take inspiration from other modern horror movies, for better or worse, but the end result is still a pretty damn entertaining gorefest.
Final Destination Bloodlines
Director: Adam Stein, Zach Lipovsky
Release Date: May 16, 2025 (Theatrical)
Rating: R
The premise of each Final Destination movie is relatively the same. At the beginning of the film, a huge accident occurs that results in the death of dozens, if not hundreds, of people, but because one person has a vision of the accident, they’re able to prevent some of them from dying. The remainder of each film sees Death traveling around and killing each survivor to balance the scales, usually in some elaborate Rube Goldberg-esque sequence of events. While earlier films kept to that formula, Final Destination Bloodlines does this differently.
The film begins in the 60s with a young woman named Iris (Brec Bassigner), seeing a vision of the skyscraper she visits collapsing and killing everyone inside. However, thanks to her actions of stopping a kid from throwing a penny off the roof AND preventing people from dancing on a glass dance floor on the top floor, no one dies. Fast forward decades later, and her grandchild, Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), is receiving Iris’ vision of the disaster at the skyscraper. She doesn’t know why this is happening, and given how her grandmother is estranged from the rest of the family, she goes out to find Iris and discover what’s going on.
Right off the bat, I love this premise. While the earlier Final Destination movies were all clearly set in modern times and using modern technology to orchestrate their deaths, this retro aesthetic is a nice change for the series. This flashback is bursting with color, and given how it’s completely removed from the time period of the rest of the series, it gives it a distinct identity. That’s only for the first ten minutes of the film, but it’s enough to make you think about what a true anthological Final Destination movie would be like, where each entry was far removed from each other in time and setting.
Copyright: Warner Bros.
That isn’t to say that what we get in Final Destination Bloodlines isn’t interesting, because it actually is. Given the sheer volume of people that never died in the accident because of Iris’ actions, Death has been spending well over 50 years slowly going through the order of people that should have died, including their families that started up during that time. That’s a catastrophic amount of deaths, but given that Iris should have been the second-to-last person to die, and her intense fear that Death is coming from her, she was able to stave off Death’s advances, developing severe agorophobia and pushing her fears onto her children. When she dies after Stefani’s visit, it’s open season for her children and grandchildren, and Death is going to make sure that all of her descendants get what’s coming to them.
From there, the film plays out like a typical Final Destination movie. We have our one character who’s attempting to prevent Death’s designs from coming to fruition, some characters believe her, some don’t, then the bizarre deaths begin to pile up, the remaining survivors believe them, and then they try to figure out how to survive, to no avail. There are some unique wrinkles here and there, like confirmation that there actually were survivors in an earlier film in the series, as well as a method to avoid Death that, while dark, is comic gold, but we all know how this is going to end.
If you’re someone who cares about the plot of a Final Destination movie, and I question why you would care about that, the plot of Bloodlines is interesting in that it focuses on a single family. You really do get a sense of the bond this family has, both positive and negative. Some are estranged from each other, either intentionally or not, and others are genuinely close and supportive of each other. It’s a different dynamic than just having a group of friends or strangers coming together to survive Death’s assault. Then again, at points the film does trend into the familial trauma territory that was explored in the recent Halloween trilogy, making parts of the film feel strangely redundant, but at least it takes the piss out of it, like killing characters mid inspirational speech or completely undermining their family in a pretty funny way.
Copyright: Warner Bros.
Again, watching a Final Destination movie for the characters is like watching a hockey game to watch the sport. Sure, you could technically do so, but we all know why we’re here. We’re here for the violence, and when Final Destination Bloodlines wants to be a vehicle for creative kills, it does an admirable job. I don’t think there are quite as many memorable kills as earlier films in the series, like the tanning bed from 3, the gymnastics jump from 5, or the original’s famous bus scene, but it still gets the job done. Some are lame, like a sequence involving a garbage truck and another one involving a pole, but then you have a kill involving an MRI, and that’s just a thing of beauty. It channels that fear that people have of hospitals in a brilliant way, doubly so if you have piercings. Pure entertainment. 10/10. No notes.
That’s the thing with Final Destination Bloodlines – when it knows to stay in its lane, it’s a fun time. I was laughing at the deaths, making jokes about what could happen next, only to see them come true, and chuckling at the sheer ridiculousness of it all. Because let’s be honest with ourselves here and just accept that this isn’t high art. This is a gory shlock fest, and that’s okay. Whenever Final Destination Bloodlines tries to be more than what it is, that’s when it loses me. The lore surrounding the death of everyone in the skyscraper is interesting, but it tries to retcon previous entries numerous times in ways that don’t make a whole lot of sense. While I do like the family interactions, the emphasis on generational trauma feels undercooked and has been done better in other films.
At the end of the day, Final Destination Bloodlines is a fun return to a long-dormant franchise and one that has a lot of energy behind it. For the most part, it never takes itself too seriously and relishes in being excessive in all the right ways. I wish it did take some bigger risks with its setting and tries to be more creative with its kills, and I question whether or not new entries can keep the same energetic spark that Bloodlines has, but as someone relatively new to the franchise, I can’t deny I had a lot of fun with this one.
