Never Say Die
‘final Destination’ gets a creative and colourful reboot in its nastiest entry yet. Yay!
Final Destination: Bloodlines
Directors: Zach Lipovsky, Adam Stein • Writers: Guy Busick, Lori Evans Taylor
Starring: Kaitlyn Santa Juana, Teo Briones, Richard Harmon, Owen Patrick Joyner, Tony Todd
USA • 1hr 50mins
Opens Hong Kong May 15 • IIB
Grade: B
If you ever wished a snotty restaurant mâitre d’ would “get theirs” on a crowded elevator or a brat of a child would meet a gruesome end – just for a nanosecond – then the series sequel-turned-reboot of the Final Destination franchise will come as a soothing balm to your soul. Final Destination: Bloodlines has very little to do with the other five films in the series, the last of which (FD5) landed 14 years ago, with the exception, naturally, of its wildly inventive and entirely sadistic Rube Goldbergian deaths. Final Destination (2000), let’s face it, is rickety AF, and the cast of mostly unknowns or B-stars were grist for the mill; they were there to die. It was a clever enough story about a school trip to Paris gone sideways after a tragic premonition of a plane crash, then the crash, then Death itself coming for the survivors. It was their time, you see. There’s no getting away. The chain reaction ends the characters met were as creative as they could be given 2000s tech and relatively low budgets, but if we’re being totally honest, time has been on FD’s side because the kills got better and now Bloodlines is the best film in franchise so far. Directing partners Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein are the anonymous guns for hire this time around, following founder James Wong (The X-Files, American Horror Story), David R Ellis (Snakes on a Plane) and regular second unit director Steven Quale (Titanic). VFX specialist Lipovsky and editor Stein aren’t expected to show off any personal flair or worldview, but they do manage to balance dark comedy (Bloodlines truly is funny at times) with grisly horror perfectly and have put a fresh shine on an ageing property.
Not close to final
The fun begins with the requisite premonition of imminent disaster, cinematographer Christian Sebaldt’s camera swirling around a Seattle Space Needle-type tower restaurant (CN Tower for Canadians out there, elbows up), the Skyview, on opening night in 1968, lightly touching on every possible hazard in and around the joint. Iris Campbell (Brec Bassinger) is there with her boyfriend when she has a vision in which everyone at the party dies a gruesome death – but she stops it and gets everyone out alive. Uh oh. Death don’t like it when you fuck with his plans. It’s a great opener.
Decades later, Iris’s granddaughter Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana, skilled at eye-bugging and looking frantic) is flunking out of college because of a recurring nightmare about the Skyview. She needs answers, so she goes home to her dad Marty (Tinpo Lee) and little brother Charlie (Teo Briones) to get them. Despite Marty telling Stefani not to ask uncle Howard (Alex Zahara) about Iris, she drives over to his house and does just that, introducing us to the cousins on her mother’s side: dumb jock type Bobby (Owen Patrick Joyner), princess Julia (Anna Lore) and heavily pierced sardonic Erik (Richard Harmon). Howard doesn’t really want to talk about his mother or about Darlene (Rya Kihlstedt), his estranged sister and Stefani and Charlie’s mom. But Stefani tracks down an older Iris (Atom Egoyan regular Gabrielle Rose) and learns of a generational curse that’s targetting Skyview survivors. Then the bodies start dropping and it. Is. Glorious.
The script by Guy Busick (2022 Scream reboot and its sequels) and television producer Lori Evans Taylor may not be entirely original but it does a good job with a story that’s fundamentally flawed: there’s no villain. And when I say flawed I mean that in a story construction way. Villains are core tenets of drama, and FD has been operating without one, except for Death itself, for 25 years. Kudos for making it work, and to Busick and Taylor who brighten up the franchise as well as supply sequel fodder; the magical lore book (think Dad’s Journal in Supernatural) suggests the 1968 tower-collapse-that-wasn’t is the seed that planted the FD tree. If Bloodlines hits, expect more cursed families for Final Destination: Family Ties or some shit. Which isn’t to detract from the expertly crafted non-starters, misdirects, ratcheting tension and final gross outs Lipovsky and Stein conjure here. You will remove your nose piercing. You will stop getting ice in your drinks. You will jog on a treadmill at the gym.
The one spot where Bloodlines takes a sober turn is in its single scene with William Bludworth, the only franchise character that can come close to being considered a recurring one. Portrayed by the late, great Tony Todd (Candyman, 24, Call of Duty: Black Ops II, Kurn, Son of Mogh), who died of stomach cancer after he finished the film, Bludworth the mortician poppoed up every so often to impart some of his expert knowledge of Death. Contrary to bringing the film to a screeching halt, Todd peppers his lines with enigmatic clues for Stefani to follow and delivers a bittersweet farewell to viewers/fans. The scene slots in perfectly because Todd was a total pro, and his gaunt visage transforms it into an ironic demonstration of the series’ central premise. RIP, Tony.