Luke Buckmaster praises Final Destination: Bloodlines for flipping the franchise on its head—literally—with a killer coin and sky-high carnage.
An early scene from the new Final Destination movie, which returns the horror franchise to the zeitgeist with an almighty roar and bang, exploits the common belief that a coin dropped from a tall building can kill somebody. This is an urban myth. But Death, the villain of the series—never seen but ever-present—might’ve been watching and thinking: how do I debunk the debunked, and indeed create a murderous penny?
There are many fiendishly inventive things about Final Destination: Bloodlines, the sixth Final Destination movie and the first in 14 years. One is how it literalises the idiom “life can turn on a dime.” Turns out death can turn on one, too.
A coin became a motif, even making its way onto the poster. As for how a penny can claim scalps: we’ve learned in previous installments that any object can work in concert with others, creating a terrible sequence that seems in the narrative world like freakish accidents, but are actually Death creatively evening the ledgers. A reverse Macgyver routine, using everyday elements to send doomed souls off the mortal coil.
Each installment begins with a crack in the divine order of things: a premonition scene in which somebody witnesses their own gnarly demise, and the demise of several others, then avoids the scenario, unsealing their fate. But a life saved is just a death momentarily evaded. These people are now on a hit list and get picked off one by one. The opening of Final Destination: Bloodlines—set during the 1960s, on a sky restaurant, at the top of a very tall building—delivers the biggest body count yet: a spectacular, vertiginous explodapalooza.
It would’ve been easy to merely reheat the formula, but co-directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein, and screenwriters Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor, take a playful approach, abiding by franchise lores while carving out the space to do things a little differently. That opening spectacle, for instance, is both a premonition and a dream sequence: a recurring nightmare that haunts college student protagonist Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana).
The nightmare is the same premonition experienced many years ago by her grandmother Iris (Brec Bassinger and Gabrielle Rose, as younger and older versions of the character respectively), who not only defied Death’s plan to kill her, but kept her descendents alive too—because they should never have existed. Keeping up? I’m not sure whether it’s better to say “this logic kind of works, if you think about it,” or if it’s best not to think at all.
Iris has been living in a fortified, shack-like compound, with quite a few pointy things around it for a person trying to avoid a very resourceful Death. Before she carks it, with a little help from a weather vane, she passes onto Stefani a chunky book containing info about how Death works, the nature of his grievances, his methodologies, perhaps what he likes to have for an afternoon snack. Also, important advice such as “when the universe speaks, you pay attention.” This paves the way for a fun plot development whereby Stefani can sort of, kind of, maybe, interpret and counter Death’s wishes in real-time. We’re told she can “see him coming” and knows when he’s “about to make a move.”
Bloodlines is a daffy but deliciously dark confection, cooked up with a devil’s grin, sprinkled with jet-black humour. An example of the latter: after discovering that people on Death’s hitlist can prolong their lives by killing somebody else, inheriting what time that person had left, two characters observe a baby unit in a hospital with a certain, shall we say, self-interested glint in their eyes—a moment of very morbid comedy.
The elaborate death scenes, as usual, are funny too—maybe even funny ha-ha depending on your mood. They’re inventive, delivering spurts of gnarly innovation. This might even be the best Final Destination movie yet.
I say “might” because, for me, this series—of which I’m a big fan—is one great big bloody tapestry of death and destruction—goofy here and there, tied together with a loose string of narrative logic, but at times fiendishly creative. Like every Final Destination movie, Bloodlines struggles to wrap things up, working with an anthology-esque format and a more or less unbeatable victim. The characters’ lives must end, at some point, but Death, and the franchise, lives on. That’s fine by me.
