If the defining tone of probably the most profitable “Final Destination” movies might be boiled right down to “unsettling, however foolish,” Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein’s “Final Destination Bloodlines” maintains that steadiness in addition to any installment earlier than it.
Fourteen years after “Closing Vacation spot 5” supposedly introduced the horror franchise full circle, Lipovsky and Stein skillfully increase its scope to accommodate an interconnected universe the place Demise steadily makes an attempt to reclaim victims throughout a number of generations. Whereas a canonically satisfying sendoff to the late Tony Todd’s William Bludworth bolsters the collection’ morbid gravitas, a forged of playful, largely likable 20-somethings preserve proceedings mild in juxtaposition to the filmmakers’ fiendishly ingenious kills.
After awaking from recurrent visions wherein her grandmother Iris (Brec Bassinger prior to now, Gabrielle Rose within the current) dies throughout the opening of a Sixties House Needle-type landmark, Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) leaves faculty to handle the relentless insomnia that’s wrecking her stellar tutorial profession. Stefani’s divorced mother and father discourage her from probing too deeply into their household’s troubled historical past for solutions, however she locates her estranged grandmother and learns of an in depth conspiracy the place Demise itself has spent a number of a long time choosing off not simply the individuals who survived the “House Needle” catastrophe however their descendants and family members.
As unlikely as Iris’ doomsday situation appears, Stefani shortly discovers that no less than a few of her grandmother’s theories are true, so the younger lady enlists her brother, Charlie (Teo Briones), and cousins to fight the cosmic forces aligning to knock all of them off. But even when she’s capable of forestall catastrophe for one among her relations, Stefani realizes that Demise’s design is extra elaborate — and affected person — than she will be able to anticipate, forcing her to undertake drastic measures to halt the lethal chain of occasions and save as many lives as attainable, even when it comes at the price of her personal.
Due to the essentially (and sometimes actually) explosive incident that units off every installment’s race towards Demise, the “Closing Vacation spot” films have at all times been front-loaded. “Bloodlines” isn’t any completely different: The bombastic “House Needle” sequence, although not fairly as relatably anxiety-inducing because the freeway pileup within the second movie, escalates to a crescendo that’s each inevitable and shocking. The place the movie differs from its predecessors is in its characters’ early receipt of documented proof of the multigeneration-spanning community of lives misplaced — and attainable strategies for disrupting it — because of a bible of kinds that’s been constructed by Iris.
Having served as “Closing Vacation spot”’s on-screen historian for the reason that 2000 authentic, Todd’s posthumous return as Bludworth provides each a young tribute to the horror luminary and retroactive connective tissue between the franchise’s disparate chapters. In the meantime, screenwriters Man Busick and Lori Evans Taylor create one impishly harmful state of affairs after one other for his or her characters whereas understanding that the movies’ foundational misdirection (particularly when it comes to how every one will die) works finest when the viewers doesn’t should droop disbelief an excessive amount of to purchase every homicidal sequence of occasions.
If a couple of of the roles might have benefited from starrier casting (any individual like Meryl Streep as reclusive survivalist Iris would have introduced the home down), Santa Juana serves as a sturdy, plausible anchor for the doomed ensemble, and particularly Richard Harmon’s surprisingly considerate flip as Stefani’s over-pierced cousin Erik enhances an general environment of subverted expectations. However as with the strongest installments within the collection, Lipovsky and Stein nimbly keep an equitable steadiness between gut-wrenching and comically unbelievable, understanding that life-and-death stakes can (and with “Closing Vacation spot,” possibly should) be a bit enjoyable.
In an age of interconnected cinematic universes, it solely took six movies and 25 years to convey collectively this horror franchise — sarcastically, one the place causality is a cornerstone of its mythology. Intelligent, unpredictable and enjoyable, “Closing Vacation spot Bloodlines” provides the collection a transfusion of creativity that just about ensures that it’ll stay to kill once more.
