Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025 | USA | 110 minutes | Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein)
No one would likely accuse the Final Destination horror franchise of being high art, but all five previous entries in the series deliver their respective thrills consistently.
The template for each Final Destination movie runs as follows: Moments before a horrific accident (plane crash, multi-car traffic accident, etc.) takes place, one would-be victim experiences a premonition of the cataclysmic event. Consequently, said would-be victim’s warnings lead several other would-be victims to safety. Cheating death in the short term, however, doesn’t mean he won’t catch up with you sooner or later. And if it’s a Final Destination movie, best believe he’ll catch up with you a LOT sooner—in the most elaborately gruesome way possible.
Sure enough, Final Destination: Bloodlines, the sixth and latest entry in the franchise, opens with yet another catastrophic accident—in this case, the 1968 collapse of Skyview Tower (a fictitious, thinly-veiled cross between the Space Needle and Canada’s CN Tower). But instead of protagonist Iris Campbell (Brec Bassinger) seeing a premonition of the impending disaster and averting it, she and her fiancé Paul (Max Lloyd-Jones) perish gruesomely, along with several dozen other hapless victims.
The entire tragedy, as it turns out, is a dream bedeviling Stefani (Kaitlin Santa Juana), a college student, and it’s wrought havoc on her academic career. The subject of her nightmares turns out to be her still-living grandmother, who did in fact save herself, Paul, and all the other folks patronizing Skyview Tower thanks to a premonition five decades ago.
Death, as it turns out, has been systematically picking off every one of the people who escaped the Skyview Tower disaster. Worst of all, the invisible but ever-present Grim Reaper’s also been targeting their descendants—all of whom literally wouldn’t exist had their ancestors not cheated death decades earlier. And it’s up to Stefani to figure out what, if anything, can be done to save her and her family from horrific, violent deaths.
That decisive tweak to the franchise formula turns out to be just one of Final Destination: Bloodlines’ many smart moves. The screenplay by Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor follows some imaginative and surprisingly complex new tangents. And while the script’s character beats occasionally feel a little stilted, the largely unknown ensemble does solid work imbuing their stock characters with some definition and personality. Best of all, directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein deftly straddle the line between giving fans what they want and integrating a more expansive mythology into this pulp-fiction Grand Guignol.
There’s always been a Tales from the Crypt-level streak of black humor in this franchise, but those gallows giggles get amplified to 11 in Bloodlines. As such, Lipovsky and Stein dole out the series’ trademark Rube Goldberg-style accidental deaths with gusto and even more inventiveness than usual. The tension of if, how and when characters make their gruesome exits likewise gets stretched and twisted like taffy, with the requisite false alarms and (pardon the pun) dead ends getting delivered as effectively and enthusiastically as the blood-soaked payoffs.
The Final Destination franchise’s reliably entertaining symphony of cartoonish misfortune, splatter and arterial spray has always housed a kernel of deep resonance. For all the gleefully sick fun at play, the series also stares longer, deeper, and more unflinchingly into the inevitability of mortality than an armada of traditional slasher flicks.
That inevitability comes to roost in a powerful and unexpectedly bittersweet way in Final Destination: Bloodlines. The movie marks the final onscreen bow for beloved genre icon Tony Todd, a towering, charismatic presence tragically cut short by cancer shortly after production wrapped.
Despite his visible frailty and brief screen time, Todd sinks his teeth into his last turn as sardonic funeral director William Bludworth—the sole, surviving through line through the entire Final Destination franchise. And when he wraps his silken yet menacing baritone around the genuinely moving monologue Busick’s and Evans Taylor’s script provides him, it elevates Final Destination: Bloodlines from lovingly crafted pulp-horror exhilaration to the most elegant of swan songs. No wonder the audience at the preview screening burst into spontaneous applause.
Final Destination: Bloodlines opens May 16 in theaters everywhere. Image courtesy New Line Cinema.