Don’t get on the plane. Don’t drive on the highway. Don’t ride rollercoasters. Stay away from everything that could go wrong. Don’t go outside. Death-proof your house. Even then, you’ll have to watch out—“he’s” watching. Not “He.”
The Final Destination series challenges the idea that “things could always be worse.” Killers may stalk the woods and the streets of New York in other horror movies, and there’re always deadly viruses and zombies and lone psychos on the loose, but if you make it out alive, you make it out alive. Unless you’re one of the five or six leads or a featured name player—but generally, no blood is predetermined. If the first Final Destination movie, starring Devon Siwa and Ali Larter, isn’t as strong as the second (and hardly a touch on the third one with Mary Elizabeth Winstead), then that just puts it in the tradition of horror franchises like Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Halloween. The first movie is never the best, and the exception is Scream. There have been some good Scream sequels, but, like Psycho and Jaws, the first one will never be topped.
It’s been 14 years since Final Destination 5, but, because of its simple and chilling premise, the series remains a part of American pop culture iconography. Final Destination Bloodlines has been promoted, in part, by lumber trucks carrying the kind of logs that destroyed a highway in Final Destination 2; its success, with first weekend box office doubling its $50 million budget, is hardly surprising in a horror boom, and at a time when American movies across the board are increasingly gory. 2004’s Saw is relatively tame today when you can see Téa Leoni and Ray Liotta getting their guts ripped out in Death of a Unicorn and Cocaine Bear. Although the series has been filled with guts from the beginning—as well as plenty of questionable CGI—Final Destination Bloodlines relies too much on computerized effects.
You get a bit numb after the first few faces are peeled off, heads are crushed, and limbs are lost. The movie lingers on its kills far too long for them to have any enduring impact; there’s nothing here that comes close to the highway scene, the rollercoaster in Final Destination 3, or even the plane crash that opens the original. Still, as a sign of the times, Final Destination Bloodlines functions remarkably well, playing the audience like an accordion; even the phones, usually unavoidable at a multiplex, were put away as everyone squirmed in their seats. Final Destination Bloodlines brings the audience back and forth from the edge with impressive agility, plausibly keeping characters alive past expected payoffs and satisfying in the end; no one steps into the middle of the street and gets run over in this one. Death is more complicated in the 2020s.
Kaitlyn Santa Juana leads a cast of fellow teens doing their best to avoid dying. Juana plays Stefani, whose nightmare of an ersatz Sky Needle collapsing opens the movie; as she begins “looking into” her dreams, her friends and family start dying. Her grandmother, now a paranoid shut-in, has vigilantly protected herself against death for decades—there was a fake Sky Needle, and while it did fall, she survived, along with many other people scheduled to die. It took years for them to be picked off one by one, but after Stefani visits her grandmother Iris (Gabrielle Rose) and gets her “death book,” she gets it too, her face impaled by a pipe minutes after she stepped outside for the first time in what must’ve been years. Being on death’s indefinite hit list is no way to live.
The only one to make it out alive is William Bludworth, series regular played by Tony Todd, who died last November. This is his last movie, and it’s not insignificant that he’s the only character to never die in a Final Destination movie. Todd’s one scene was, in part, written by the actor himself, and it’s the one scene in the movie with any real gravitas, the kind of magnetism that Final Destination has always curiously lacked in its leads, with the notable exception of Mary Elizabeth Winstead (if only Ali Larter was a main lead at some point…)
But if the 2020s are about guts and rot and messy, putrid death at the movies, there are few horror franchises more suited to the times than Final Destination. With people more paranoid and self-aware than ever—and with an abundance of phones—it’s easy to see why Scream has already had two 2020s sequels (with a third and fourth and fifth only stalled due to political disagreements and cast turnover). But while there may be more good-to-okay Scream sequels, Final Destination can always be improved upon; the bar has been set by Final Destination 3. It’s not inconceivable that another one can enter the pantheon of predetermined, unbeatable death.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @MonicaQuibbits