USA. 2025.
Crew
Directors – Zach Lipovsky & Adam Stein, Screenplay – Guy Busick & Lori Evans Taylor, Story – Guy Busick, Lori Evans Taylor & Jon Watts, Producers – Toby Emmerich, Dianne McGunigle, Craig Perry, Sheila Hanahan Taylor & Jon Watts, Photography – Christian Sebaldt, Music – Tim Wynn, Visual Effects Supervisor – Nordin Rahhali, Visual Effects – Digital Domain 3.0 Inc, Folks & Pixomondo (Supervisor – Ryan Freer), Special Effects Supervisor – Tony Lazarowich, Makeup Effects – Masters FX, Production Design – Rachel O’Toole. Production Company – Practical Pictures/Freshman Year/Fireside Films.
Cast
Kaitlyn Santa Juana (Stefani Reyes), Richard Harmon (Erik Campbell), Rya Kihlshedt (Darlene Campbell), Teo Briones (Charlie Reyes), Owen Patrick Joyner (Bobby Campbell), Alex Zahara (Howard Campbell), Gabrielle Rose (Iris Present Day), April Amber Telek (Aunt Brenda), Timpo Lee (Marty Reyes), Tony Todd (William John Bludworth), Anna Lore (Julia Campbell), Brec Bassinger (Iris 1960s), Max Lloyd-Jones (Paul Campbell)
Plot
In 1969, Iris Campbell and her boyfriend Paul attend the opening of the Sky View Tower but Iris has a premonition that a coin that a kid tosses over the edge will set off a chain of events that will kill everybody. She is able to act to prevent the catastrophe. In the present-day, Iris’s granddaughter Stefani Reyes experiences troubling dreams of the incident. She defies her parents to go and visit Iris who has become a crazed recluse. Iris starts talking about Death coming for them and lives in fear of catastrophe occurring at every turn, but Stefani thinks this is crazy talk. Iris steps out the door as Stefani departs only for be killed right in front of her. After her father is killed in a freak accident with a lawnmower, Stefani comes to believe. She tries to impart on the others that because Iris cheated Death’s purpose and went on to have a family, none of them are by extension meant to exist. The others ridicule the notion but a series of freak accidents then begin to kill each of them.
Final Destination (2000) in which Devon Sawa has a vision that prevents him from having an airline crash only for each of them to then be killed off in a series of freak accidents, was a modest hit. This was followed by a series of sequels with Final Destination 2 (2003), Final Destination 3 (2006), The Final Destination (2009) and Final Destination 5 (2011) where different casts cheat different types of accidents before being killed in bizarre ways. I have never been much of a fan of the series. It is a single film that should never have been extruded to a series because of the thinness of the original concept where each entry is frustrated by a lack of any real explanation about anything going on other than vague terms slung around about “evading Death’s purpose.”
It has been fourteen years since the last entry in the series Final Destination 5. The new version is Executive Produced and has a story from Jon Watts, director of the Tom Holland Spider-Man film. The new directors are Adam Stein and Zach Lipovsky who have made Tasmanian Devils (2013), Leprechaun: Origins (2014), Dead Rising: Watchtower (2015), the quite remarkable psychic powers film Freaks (2018) and the live-action film version of Kim Possible (2019).
The term ‘reimagining’ is often slung around to a point of meaninglessness to simply mean the same as before with a different cast or creative team. In this case, Final Destination: Bloodlines is one film that can be genuinely said to reimagine its predecessors. The new script takes the basic premise that served all the foregoing films and, while there is no more explanations than we usually get about Death’s purpose, this is twisted in some new and imaginative ways. Most notedly, we go from the usual survivors in the aftermath of an accident to several decades on when one of the survivors has now had a family and grandchildren, all of whom are now facing elimination.
From the opening scene set in the Sky Tower in the 1960s, Lipovsky and Stein signal that we are in for fun this time around with an improbable chain of events that all begin with a coin being tossed over the side by a kid to cracking glass dancefloors leaving survivors hanging from struts and then bodies falling and splattering on the pavement below as, with an eminently black touch, Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head (1969) plays on the radio.
Lipovsky and Stein have a great deal of fun with the audience, especially in the barbecue scene where they keep snaking away to playfully tease us with potential threats in every corner – a rake beneath the trampoline, a game of Jenga, a beer bottle sitting on a table edge, a shard of broken glass that gets mixed into the ice in someone’s drink, all before the capper to the scene where a chain of events come together causing Alex Zahara to be killed by a lawnmower.
There are equally amusing set-pieces where Richard Harmon is in his tattoo parlour and manages to get his nose piercing hooked in a chain that is being wound around the ceiling fan and is being forced to stand on tiptoes on chairs and the counter at the same time as spilled chemicals start a fire. The funniest of the scenes is the one where Kaitlyn Santa Juana walks along the streets trying to warn Richard Harmon of all the potential dangers of leaf blowers, kids playing basketball, garbage bins and an oncoming garbage truck, which he ridicules and taunts to no effect, before in the background all of said things cause Anna Lore to be knocked into a garbage bin and automatically swept up into the back of the truck. Finally, we get a Final Destination film with a sense of humour.
The most outrageously entertaining of the sequences is the one at the hospital when Richard Harmon takes Owen Patrick Joyner away to feed him peanuts so that his allergy will kill him and he can revive then him to thwart the line of deaths. Things all conspire to switch an MRI machine on and crank it up to maximum where we see the hilarious vision of Harmon’s ear, nose, nipple rings and penis piercing all tearing themselves out, while a wheelchair impacts against him, forcing his body to splatter in the bore of the MRI machine. Joyner gets his EpiPen and seems set to survive only for a broken spring from the vending machine to fly across the hall and impale in his head and keep on twisting even with half his head missing.
The one continuity thread through all of the Final Destination films except the fourth was the presence of Tony Todd as the coroner Bludworth and he appears again here. Final Destination: Bloodlines was shot before Todd’s death of stomach cancer in November 6, 2024. Todd looks positively cadaverous in the one scene where we meet him, a pale shadow of the larger-than-life presence that Todd usually has on screen. His appearance makes for a poignant tribute, least of all where he announces he is off to retire and invokes them to live life while it is there.
Trailer here