FINAL DESTINATION: BLOODLINES — Back and Better Than Ever

Review by Adam Donato

In hindsight, it’s crazy they never made a sixth installment in the franchise until now. The fifth film had the best reviews in the franchise up until that point and still made almost four times its budget. For a franchise that isn’t overly concerned with the overarching storyline, what’s stopping them from conjuring up more elaborate deaths to make up a movie. Delays and a writers strike contributed to this gap in the franchise. Over a decade later, how will the franchise fare with audiences?

The opening sequence of the film is the best of the entire franchise. It’s so well laid out and utterly epic. People come to these movies to have fun with these death sequences. It’s scary for the paranoid and superstitious, gross out for the sickos, and funny for the morbid. The third act has some big time deaths, but the second act is really where the film slows down with its scares. 

Obviously, the Final Destination franchise is pretty low bar and formulaic, but one way that it stands above the rest is there are some likeable characters and interesting ideas at play. A particular standout character is played by Richard Harmon. He literally takes over the movie to a good bit in the middle. A moderately funny character with an amount of depth. This is the first major theatrical role for Kaitlyn Santa Juana and she held her own as the lead. It would be criminal to not shoutout the late Tony Todd. His scene in the film is hands down the most genuine moment of the entire franchise.

The story plays out pretty much the same as the entire franchise, but this is clearly a system that works. Our main character starts having the same horrific dream every night and goes on a journey to uncover the traumatic past of her family. It’s effective seeing this already damaged family absolutely crumble from within. It’s not an ocean, but the Final Destination movies have been swimming in one of those small plastic dog pools so we will take it.

Final Destination: Bloodlines is going to gain a lot of goodwill for resurrecting the franchise, but still come closer to the middle than the front of the pack of this year's horror movie slate. It delivers the good with the stuff you pay to see and doesn’t drop dead when people aren’t actively dying on screen. The box office should be competitive with the wake of Sinners's good word of mouth, but every other horror entry out now is a dud and there isn’t another major horror release until M3GAN 2.0 in late June. There could easily be one of these every couple years. It will satisfy critics and embolden fans of the franchise already. 

Final Destination: Bloodlines is in theaters now. 
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Rating: 3/5