Miss Flicks

Final Destination: Bloodlines – Film Review

How has it been 14 years since the release of the last Final Destination movie?! It feels like only yesterday that I was watching Final Destination 5 in the cinema with my 3D glasses on. So as you can imagine, I was very excited to see Final Destination: Bloodlines.

The film stars Kaitlyn Santa Juana as Stefani, who keeps having the same nightmare about a tower collapse in the 1960s. She discovers that her nightmare is actually a premonition her grandmother had before she saved hundreds of people from the disaster. What happened to those survivors? Death came for them of course!

The previous five Final Destination films followed the same formula – a person has a premonition about a major disaster and prevents several deaths that day. By doing so, they ruin Death’s design but it soon comes back to kill them another way.

Bloodlines mixes up the usual formula by giving a different person the premonition and increasing the number of survivors. What happens when it takes Death decades to kill off all the people who were supposed to die in a particular disaster? And what happens if they had children, who weren’t supposed to exist? I really like how they expanded upon the established rules of the franchise and tried something new. 

After the extended premonition scene (which feels like the longest one yet), it takes a while to get going because there are a lot of characters and relationships to set up first. This tells a more substantial story compared to the last two and is not purely kill after kill. But rest assured, there are plenty of inventive and horrifically brutal deaths (I can’t stop thinking about one in particular). Some of the effects are iffy but it delivers on the gore and the build-up to a kill is so tense that I watched through my fingers often.

This instalment is easily the funniest of the franchise too. I laughed out loud far more than I expected. Stefani’s cousin Erik (Richard Harmon) makes a lot of jokes and his brother Bobby (Owen Patrick Joyner) is adorably scared of dying. There are also some brilliant needle drops that made me chuckle. Harmon was actually my favourite cast member – he had so much personality and the most memorable lines – but of course, it was fantastic to see the late great Tony Todd back at his OG character William Bludworth.

Final Destination: Bloodlines honours the originals and connects to them in a meaningful way while trying to be its own thing. It’s a great time at the movies.

In cinemas from Wednesday 14th May