“Final Destination” is the latest horror franchise to get a legacy sequel. We’ve seen it with “Scream,” “Candyman,” “Halloween Ends,” and coming this summer, “I Know What You Did Last Summer.” It says something about the horror field in the late ‘90s that aside from the “Saw” series, there’s been nothing new under the sun that held up to this gory and inventive time period. The last “Final Destination” film, Part V, was released in 2011 and the franchise petered out. Yet Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein’s “Final Destination: Bloodlines” is an attempt to add a new element to the story. In that it succeeds, brining the ‘curse’ of death to something that can stalk a bloodline. However, it includes one too many meta references and one too many camera winks to be what it mostly promises to be: a horror film.
The film starts with an homage to the 1960s. A couple, Iris (Brec Bassinger) and her boyfriend (Max Lloyd-Jones ) are driving to a surprise for Iris’ birthday. It turns out to be a grand opening of a sky tower restaurant (think Niagara Falls’ Skylon Tower). As the couple walks in, Iris starts to notice things: elevator doors hard to shut, people stomping on the glass floor, etc., that lead her to believe something is awry.
The Latest Legacy Sequel
This is a “Final Destination” film, and it’s a given that the tower will be involved in a disaster. However, the way it is handled spoke of trying too hard. It’s meta-aware and intentional rather than accidental. ‘60s music plays in the background, and party-goers dance on glass floors ignorant of the fact they are breaking. Yet the scene lacked imperative or urgency. In the “Final Destination” series opener, Alex’s (Devon Sawa) vision was horrifying, even if the rest of the movie was rote and methodical. Here the horror is sidetracked to try and be ironic and comical, which just didn’t work for me.
The set of events the opening sequence triggers, however, are the meat of the movie. We soon learn that a college student, Stefanie (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) is having dreams of the same tower collapse. Her grandmother was Iris and her premonition and actions that day saved many people who shouldn’t have been saved. Now it’s after their families, who never should have been born.
The good aspects of “Final Destination: Bloodlines” are its unique-ish story and the actors, who all play likable roles. If we’re being honest here, “Final Destination” was fresh for the time. It came up with a plot that’s been copied by many others films, most notably “It Follows” and “Smile.” Here it sets up its protagonist—who appears the part of a sleep deprived and horror-filled college student—and a family she’s strayed from. She has a distant relationship with her father (Tinpo Lee) and her brother (a great Teo Briones) is fierce and independent and wishes she was around more. They all wish she would just drop this premonition/dream thing. This is especially true of her uncle Howard (Alex Zahara), when he realizes Stefanie wants to question his mother (Gabrielle Rose, the Iris from the ‘60s) on her experience during that disaster.
Often Too Meta and Comedic
The ‘bloodline’ of the family is here introduced one-by-one, and I was pleased with how utterly likable they all were. My favorites were the aforementioned Howard, whom Zahara plays with emotion and heart. The younger kids (college-aged or slightly older) are mostly decent kids, and Eric (Richard Harmon) and his brother Bobby (Owen Patrick Joyner) are fleshed out and real, and not caricatures like Kerr Smith and Sean William Scott were in the original. Harmon has a number of great scenes, acting as both comic relief and heart when the film needs it. Some additional families members round out the cast, even if some are cannon fodder, as a movie like this needs.
Yet what doesn’t vibe about “Bloodlines” is its total expectation that you’ve seen other films in the franchise—not just for plot familiarity but also its necessity. As Stefanie is explaining to her family that they’re all going to die unless they follow the rules, it felt like the film is acting out a script rather than following a logical conclusion. Since this happened in “Final Destination”—and this is a sequel—it must happen here. But yet I never believed Stefanie acted this out for any other reason than the film’s need to explain it to the audience. In the 2000 opener, you could see terror in Sawa’s eyes and know he believed it. Here it felt forced and kind of lazy, much to my chagrin.
Entertainment if Not Really Scary
The meta-aware jokes are a problem too, insomuch as they dent a lot of the film’s intended horror. There’s almost no stage setting, nor an attempt on the filmmakers’ part to subvert your expectations on how a scene will play out. Many of the set-ups to the film’s kills are laid out internally. It feels as if Lipovsky and Stein are rushing to get to the good stuff, even though the film’s lack of tension and foreboding don’t earn it the right to get there. The film also has such a lighthearted and rushed feeling that when the deaths do occur, most are funny (many in the theater around me laughed). I feel this is odd for a horror film, but it is what a lot of people want these days.
The gore is one of the points of this film, and in that department it excels. It excels also in coming up with over-the-top and creative death sequences, but gets too carried away with them to the point it overshadows the characters they happen to. The gore is strong but nothing we haven’t seen before. It’s less intense than any of the “Saw” films and nowhere near as bloody as “Hostel” or “Terrifier.” Since a lot of it is done so comedically, I doubt the film will bother anyone on a visceral level.
Still Entertaining Throughout
The biggest problem with “Bloodlines” is it just feels like something is missing. It’s getting rave reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, so its audience—and critics—seem to be loving it. Yet I kept waiting to be scared, waiting to be unnerved, and I never felt that. It features what would be the swan song of the late horror icon Tony Todd, whose character delivers not creepy subtextual dialogue like in the first film, but lines about death and appreciating life—which must have been hard for the actor, who sadly died of cancer last year.
Yet “Final Destination: Bloodlines” is not a bad film. If you liked the other “Final Destination” films, you’ll probably like this one. It’s faring better critically than others, and has a necessity in bringing back the franchise. Early trailers positioned it as a way to confront the horror of death once and for all, but that’s not what we have here. This is entertainment for entertainment’s sake. If this does well, they’ll probably make more of these. You’ll laugh and be treated to gore aplenty, assuming you don’t need a serious story to go along with it. On the way out of the theater as my wife was holding the door for a couple behind her, a dustpan handle fell, then knocking a broom that was resting on the wall in front of her feet. If that’s not the epitome of a total theater experience, I don’t know what is.
