Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)

College student Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) is plagued by recurring nightmares of a big, bloody and very digital catastrophe in a sky-view style restaurant. It’s getting so bad, her once famous academic prowess is suffering. Because these dreams star a young version of her grandmother, she decides to return home to dig for family secrets.

There she encounters an older generation that doesn’t want to talk about family secrets like the fact that Grandma is living in a weird cabin in the middle of nowhere thereby trying to stave off the death of her whole family line (or is plain crazy), and a younger one wont to not very interesting whining. Everyone’s also prone to the kind of melodrama without which the amateurish script would screech to a halt. One can’t blame death for trying to wipe them out in the series-standard gory accidents. One can blame him for taking his dear time with it.

Sometimes, you should really cut your losses – unless somebody with an actual sense of imagination gets their hands on the Final Destination franchise again, there are only ever drearily “funny” death pinball entries in the franchise’s future.

Directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein, the former of which already tried my patience with crap like Dead Rising: Watchtower and Leprechaun: Origins a decade ago, or one of the five people listed with scriptwriting and story duties try to turn the whole death business into a family affair, during which death doesn’t only try to wipe out the unplanned survivors of catastrophes but also their spawn, I mean, descendants. And yes, of course the film is not going to really hold to these new rules, because that would take actual effort by the filmmakers. Obviously, the only effort anyone’s taken here with anything are the death scenes. Ironically, these try a bit too hard to be clever and twisty in the way only the most stupid things do, so there’s only a small degree of joy to be found here. The film’s painfully digital look – not something I tend to complain about – robs most of the killing of any physical weight anyway, and the film’s insistence on digital blood really doesn’t help here at all.

The character work is dull and mechanical, with everyone being either bland or annoying, probably to fit better with the CGI.

The only moment of actual humanity here is the final appearance of Tony Todd in a scene not even Lipovsky and Stein can rob of it. Still, I would have wished the man could have gone out with a film worthy of him.