FINAL DESTINATION: BLOODLINES - Mark Reviews Movies

Final Destination: Bloodlines, Warner Bros. Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 15, 2025

Apparently, Death just needed an extended holiday. It has been 14 years since the last movie in this franchise, which was clearly running out of ideas after its surprisingly clever third installment. While Final Destination: Bloodlines doesn't bring anything new to the series, the film does understand the twisted appeal of its concept. Death here, once again coming up with elaborate schemes to pick off victims, is terrifying and darkly funny—sometimes at the same time.

That sense of humor is vital to the success of one of these movies. Without it, we're just watching bodies be punished in such sickening ways that there'd be little purpose to it. The most effective films in this series give us the sense of an invisible Death watching and chuckling with demented glee as seemingly ordinary situations transform into Rube Goldberg-like machinations of inevitable carnage. In directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein's belated sequel, we can almost hear Death cackling with wicked delight.

Again, the screenplay, by series newcomers Gary Busick and Lori Evans Taylor, doesn't provide any unique new conceits to this material, but it does possess two minor ones worthy of some mention. The first is to bring the traditional opening sequence of envisioned catastrophe into the past.

This one, specifically, is set in the 1960s, as a young woman named Iris (Brec Bassinger) is surprised by her boyfriend with a trip to the grand opening of a restaurant sitting atop a giant tower. Many things don't sit right with Iris—from the fact that construction ended ahead of schedule, to the way the glass doors of the elevator don't close entirely, to the presence of a maliciously mischievous child with a penny he stole from the fountain at the tower's base, to the glass dance floor looking straight down to the ground below, to the sound of Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" playing on the radio just as she arrives.

The list goes on, in fact. The filmmakers know the foreshadowing of these sequences has become as much about the audience trying to imagine how all of these elements will come together into a massive disaster as it is establishing tension.

The payoffs to everything we witness in passing or as the camera draws attention to certain details (how it, for example, follows that unlucky coin) are predictably horrifying, even if the specifics of how and why and to what extent everything unfolds here are often nasty surprises. The jokes are both in the gruesome shocks (such as a moment involving the elevator) and in the precision with which the chain reaction of calamity occurs. The whole process is so exactingly constructed that it's difficult to tell which detail of one moment—what happens to the dance floor or what song is playing on the radio when it happens—would ruin the gag more.

As for the actual plot, it's set in the present day and follows the usual course of one of these movies. A group of people realize they're on Death's list and attempt to avoid more isolated instances of domino-effect death scenes. The gimmick of this one, however, is a bit different and gives a sense of just how determined the film's version of Death really is.

Basically, Iris prevented the disaster at the tower, and since hundreds of people were saved from what should have happened, Death has spent the ensuing decades killing the survivors and all of their progeny, who shouldn't exist if things had happened the way they were supposed to. The late, great Tony Todd, once again playing the enigmatic mortician who somehow understands everything about Death's plan, puts it plainly in a scene that explains the character's knowledge, while also providing the actor a surprisingly touching farewell.

The point is that an older Iris (played by Gabrielle Rose), who has fortified herself in a remote cabin, is still on Death's list, but so, too, are her grandchildren Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) and Charlie (Teo Briones), their trio—Erik (Richard Harmon), Bobby (Owen Patrick Joyner), and Julia (Anna Lore)—of cousins, and Iris' own children Darlene (Rya Kihlstedt), Stefani and Charlie's mother, and Howard (Alex Zahara). Stefani has started sharing her grandmother's visions of deadly possibility from the past and in the future, and as soon as her family members start dying off one by one and in the lineage of their birth, the survivors realize the notion of Death having it out for them isn't as ridiculous as it sounds.

Of course, Death's own devices are patently absurd, which is how we know it's fine to and can't help but laugh at some of the more devious and/or convoluted demises in this film. Stefani flippantly predicts one while walking down the sidewalk but doesn't take into account how a garbage truck will figure into it. A family barbecue has so many hidden death traps that the filmmakers' skill at misdirection is on full display, and in that same vein, the punch line to one sequence at a tattoo parlor comes when we least expect it. It's better to say even less about a scene at a hospital, which gets a full workout from a certain medical device, and the story's final turn.

It's surprising that this series took some time off, especially since it continued to perform well financially until its hiatus, but that absence, apparently, allowed these filmmakers to figure out how and why these movies can work when they do. As a result, Final Destination: Bloodlines is a refreshing return.

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