Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)

***/****
starring Brec Bassinger, Richard Harmon, April Telek, Tony Todd
screenplay by Guy Busick & Lori Evans Taylor
directed by Zach Lipovsky & Adam B. Stein

by Walter Chaw I love the Final Destination franchise that James Wong started with writing partner Glen Morgan–all six films, but particularly the two Wong directed. Wong and Morgan were, of course, instrumental in the creation of “The X Files” and its stickier, gloomier spiritual brother, “Millennium”. I love the absolute nihilism of Final Destination‘s premise and its suggestion that Death is a mysterious force more interested in contriving incredible machines to complete its dread duty than in, you know, just giving someone a heart attack. But is it Death in a playful, Ingmar Bergman sense, playing chess on the beach in the middle of a mass-casualty event with a survivor of a genocidal campaign who’s come home to find he’s brought the plague with him? What kind of person must one be for Death to want to hang out with them? The type of person who’s very good for business. No, Final Destination is more Death as an artificial intelligence, I think–an algorithm fed vaguely conflicting instructions that labours to maintain this corner of the Matrix of which it’s in charge: fix glitches but, and here’s the rub, don’t let the subjects know there’s been a glitch and that it’s being fixed. So it’s not a sentience, exactly, but a subroutine in a larger system. A celestial calculator. The biggest twist left for the series would be the identification of the being that made our lives an accounting problem it sent a somewhat limited clockwork to manage in the first place.

Appearing in 2000 (one month after Scream 3 premiered), Final Destination opens with a high-school French class leaving for a seven-hour transatlantic flight when schlubby everyman Alex Browning (Devon Sawa) has an extremely detailed premonition of their plane disintegrating upon takeoff and makes enough of a fuss to get himself and a few of his classmates kicked off the flight. His vision comes true, of course, though Alex is treated like a pariah rather than a hero who is, himself, suffering under a heavy burden of survivor’s guilt. Then the survivors start dying off in the order in which they would have died had they boarded the ill-fated Flight 180. Death, it seems, has a plan–or, rather, Death is like one of those Boston Dynamics robot dogs that keeps getting hit by bats: there’s no real design in there, only a bull-headed determination to keep trudging forward. Like Jesus at Cavalry, say, or Bronko Nagurski. (Recognition in that comparison of why we both like and fear the robot dog.) People describing the Final Destination films are proud of unpacking it as a slasher franchise in which Death is the slasher, as if this isn’t just a description of life–and slasher movies. What I love about these films is how the only thing they have on their mind is the myriad and absurd ways we can die at any moment. There’s a certain moral purity in recognizing how temporary and unpredictable everything is. And, crucially, how intrinsically death is a part of living and not, ironically, a thing to be feared.

Final Destination began life as a “Twilight Zone” premise expanded to feature-length. Indeed, I am reminded of a notable episode of that show’s ’60s run–season 3’s “Nothing in the Dark”–featuring Death made manifest as an impossibly young Robert Redford, posing as a rookie police officer gravely wounded at the doorstep of one Wanda Dunn (Gladys Cooper). Wanda has barricaded herself away in a hermetically sealed floor-level apartment, refusing any contact with the outside world for fear that Death would come and take her away. When Death finds her and wiles his way into her trust, it’s clear that passing away quietly into the next part of living is preferable to Wanda’s eternity of living hunted and afraid. There are two Wanda-esque characters in the Final Destination series. The first, Clear Rivers (Ali Larter), survived the original film by checking herself into a carefully monitored padded cell in a secure mental institution.

The second is Iris Campbell (Gabrielle Rose as an old person, Brec Bassinger as the young version) of the sixth film, Final Destination: Bloodlines, who has built an off-the-grid safety shack on a fortified plot of land, where she has successfully eluded Death for decades after saving dozens from the collapse of a Space Needle-like rotating restaurant. Each of these films begins with an elaborate set-piece that shows in loving detail the many ways a human body can be ruptured, ripped, and ravaged by catastrophic mechanical failures. The first features a plane crash, the second an infamous freeway catastrophe featuring a poorly secured haul of giant logs. Then a rollercoaster, a NASCAR calamity, a bridge collapse, and finally this revolving restaurant. The curveball this time around is that the restaurant disaster is set in the early 1960s, and our vision of the premonition is a terrifying recurring dream suffered by Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), who is obviously not the premonition’s subject: Iris Campbell.

The deaths in these films are most commonly described as Rube Goldberg contraptions–like that old board game “Mouse Trap”, where you spent more time setting up the elaborate trap than you ever did playing the game itself. In truth, only one or two fatalities per film fit that description, and even then, they’ll generally rely on either liquid shorting out an electrical outlet or a trail of liquid catching fire. Often both. Revisiting the first five entries, I was surprised by the paucity of invention: the conflation of their exceptional prologues with the movies as a whole muddying the memory, I suppose, though I genuinely like how quotidian most of the unfortunate events are. Such as the guy who slips in a bathtub and strangles to death on a cord, or the various people creamed by cars when they’re incautious around traffic, or the tanning-bed mishap set to the Ohio Players‘ “Love Rollercoaster” in Final Destination 3. Not to mention the construction calamities and various impalements and strangulations and elevator decapitations and escalator hijinks… Along the way, note the stealth commentary on America’s failing infrastructure and general lack of regulatory oversight. You scoff, but I still remember an entire overpass crushing a family on the freeway I commute on daily. This simulation is so massive that the inevitably ridiculous, inexplicable convergences of unrelated occurrences make it seem like some supernatural intelligence has it out for you when, really, there are an inconceivable number of variables–too many to coordinate. This is the root of irony, yes? You can blame God for the butterfly effect that killed your mother, but what’s truly terrifying is that no one is in control of shit.

All of which to say, I appreciate the last couple of sequels attempting to deviate from the lore. In Final Destination 5, someone finally figures out that if they’re going to be harvested in the order they were supposed to have died in the disaster they’ve avoided, then they’re essentially immortal until the people higher on the list than them die. And, given that they’re now living in a loophole as long as their “safety net” is alive, they may as well employ their temporary invincibility for the purposes of evil. I appreciate the recurring character of coroner/mystic Bludwurth (Tony Todd), whose insight into the larger design at play across the series is born more from professional experience than from any arcane knowledge. Bloodlines is Todd’s final performance, and he gets an opportunity to speak the overriding thesis that life is short and brutal, so find joy where you can with the people you love. And I really like the Jaws: The Revenge reveal in Bloodlines that suggests death is an inheritance, because you know what? Of course it is–and you can either waste time lamenting the tragic inevitability of death, or you can cut the shit and fit some living in before you go.

If you’re so inclined, I recommend the Final Destination films as a sextet. It’s a relatively consistent treatise on the barrage of awful shit that can happen when you’re not paying attention (and even when you are) and the mental energy you burn worrying about things that are beyond your control. I could rank the films (Bloodlines would possibly trail just behind Wong’s two entries), but that seems a masturbatory pursuit when they’re all within spitting distance of each other. I could complain that the fourth film is uncharacteristically mean, but c’mon. The gore is uniformly fun across six movies (a running gag in Bloodlines involving one guy’s too-many-piercings is truly inspired), and there’s a Jackass catharsis to be had from gathering to worship at the church of a capricious universe that doesn’t give a single fuck if you’re good or bad, because life will have its way with you one way or another. What a burden to believe otherwise. What a terrible curse to worship a God that would permit all the egregious shit in the world to happen, and to spend the time you have making excuses you can’t justify. What if life were Final Destination? What if your appearance here is an accident, and the only thing that’s sure is that this accident will correct itself? Go have a root beer float. Go tell that girl you love her. Life is for the living of it. And thanks for the farewell you chose, Tony: I’m proud to have called you a friend; I miss you every day.