Splat! Ouch! Yaroo! Yes, it’s another movie in the Final Destination franchise and this one is among the best of six so far…
Review by Tim Robins
Final Destination: Bloodlines is formulaic stuff, but it’s a good formula. A premonition of disaster leads to people being saved from the face of death, but Death has other plans. One by one, everyone who was supposed to die meet grisly ends in the order they should have died originally – sometimes…
This new film brings another twist. After being rescued from certain death in a sky-high restaurant, the survivors have gotten married, had children (not necessarily in that order) and those children have gone on to have children. In short, entire generations are alive who should never have been born.
Toxic relationships have also been handed down from generation to generation. Those survivors who have worked out Death’s plan have had to protect themselves, at the cost of their children’s emotional welfare.
After suffering vivid nightmares of the Skyview restaurant’s destruction back in 1958, young college student, Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Juana), must overcome family conflict to find Iris, her grandmother, and piece together her involvement in the terrible events in Stefani’s dream.
Reyes finds Iris (Gabrielle Rose) in a log cabin that is all but hidden behind a deadly obstacle course, built to ward off Death. As Reyes enters the cabin, Death makes its move. Soon, Iris’s children and grandchildren are bloodline set up to die, along with anyone who dares get in the way of Death’s plans.
Although critics have praised this new entry into the Final Destination franchise, a lot of critics have been ridiculously dismissive of the script and the cast. It’s common to hear commentators arguing that, for example, they “enjoyed every second of people dying because that’s what you’re there for” and “you turn off your brain, you don’t obviously really care about the story, you’re just there to see the body count”. I couldn’t agree less.
If you aren’t interested in the characters in the films, you aren’t going to care whether they live or die. The cast, including a boy with a peanut allergy and another with one piercing too many, may be drawn in cinematic shorthand – but you’ll still find yourself rooting for them to survive. And you’ll still be scanning the screen, to second guess how Death is going to strike.
Will Erik Campbell (Richard Harmon) die by being strangled on a decorative chain hanging from the ceiling of a tattoo parlour where he works? Or will he be burnt alive, after a chemical spill ignites… or will he simply be blown sky high with the rest of the parlour? I wouldn’t have cared about any of these questions if I hadn’t been enjoying Harmon’s performance.
The script, by Guy Busik and Lori Evans Taylor, is cleverly structured. It rests on the deceptively simple premise that anything in life can kill you under the wrong circumstances. In essence, the Final Destination franchise is about people having a really unfortunate run of bad luck.
Personifying Death and turning the ‘accidents’ into his ‘revenge’, add an extra edge, while removing a lot of the unpleasantness that comes with serial killers. In a way, the set-ups make the deaths feel like a punchline to an elaborate joke. The audience was laughing throughout, as did I. This sounds ghoulish, but laughter relieves the considerable, pent up, anxiety born from the way the script builds up our expectations for what is to come.
Directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein have great comic timing. For example, a deadly sequence of events is described as just one of a number of possible scenarios which then actually happens. This is in one of the more visible and gory scenes in the film: I actually had to look away towards the end. You really won’t want the characters to die, even the stroppy, angry ones. Right to the end, you’ll hope they have escaped Death’s clutches
One, apparent survivor is Tony Todd, (from Candyman and The Rock). who has been in all the movies, and plays JB as the man-who-explains-what’s-going-on. The actor himself died after recording his scenes, so his on screen departure is poignant and tasteful although, right up to the last minute I was waiting for something to spring out from behind a door and demolish his face.
This sequel ties together all the past movies and had been rumoured to be the last in the franchise. I don’t think it will be. In fact, a re-boot has already been touted. There were 14 years between Final Destination five and six. This time, I can’t see Death waiting that long to return.
Tim Robins
Final Destination – Bloodlines is awaiting you in cinemas now
Dear reader, a review is an opinion. Other opinions are available, including yours
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A freelance journalist and Doctor Who fanzine editor since 1978, Tim Robins has written on comics, films, books and TV programmes for a wide range of publications including Starburst, Interzone, Primetime and TV Guide.
His brief flirtation with comics includes ghost inking a 2000AD strip and co-writing a Doctor Who strip with Mike Collins. Since 1990 he worked at the University of Glamorgan where he was a Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Media Studies and the social sciences. Academically, he has published on the animation industry in Wales and approaches to social memory. He claims to be a card carrying member of the Politically Correct, a secret cadre bent on ruling the entire world and all human thought.
Categories: Features, Film, Other Worlds, Reviews
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