Let's at least acknowledge the longevity. It was fully 25 years ago when the brains trust at New Line Cinema realised they could piggyback on the success of Wes Craven's Scream films with a franchise that swerved the hassle of story and characters (and that irritating metaness) to give gorehounds all the kill scenes they could possibly want of a Friday night; indeed, the first wave of Final Destinations realised they could profitably use the time saved on story and character development to make those kill scenes the whole, spectacular package. (Also uppermost in the series' golddigging DNA: the entire second half of James Cameron's blockbusting Titanic.) These would be disaster movies where you weren't encouraged to care about anybody on screen; they were Rube Goldberg machines pointed inescapably towards death, designed to chew up everyone that fell into their maws, to reduce the sum total of their frames to a big fat zero. The franchise took off among teenage nihilists, naturally, and even managed to survive the supposed ironyslayer of 9/11 (a very Final Destination-ish spectacle, considered in this context), remaining an ongoing commercial concern as late as last decade's Final Destination 5. Now, following a sorta-successful Scream reboot, we get the revival Final Destination: Bloodlines, which attempts to retcon some existential superstructure onto the films so far, while obviously preying on any nostalgia for the exploitation cinema of our misspent youth. At my screening, Bloodlines was prefaced with a trailer for the new I Know What You Did Last Summer, arriving later this year: in the absence of any more elevating vision for the popular cinema, everything that goes around comes back around, to be pancaked by a speeding dumptruck.
My objection to Bloodlines remains largely constitutional: as with the reckless endangerment of the Jackass franchise, which emerged from the same sniggering cultural moment (and itself sought its post-lockdown flowers), this continues to be very much Not My Jam. Partly it's the combination of glibness and cheapness that sits so uncomfortably in my gut: we are once more invited to chuckle, again and again, upon seeing the bodies of non-characters played by no-mark actors being endlessly torn apart. (It'd make an especially tricky round on TV's Pointless: without consulting the IMDb, name any of the actors who appeared in the original movie. Four people will have said Devon Sawa, and that was the level the franchise was operating at in its pomp.) Partly it's the way these films foreground their own cynical engineering, so that it becomes impossible to approach them as anything other than killing machines. Bloodlines opens with a 1960s-set prologue involving a fateful date night at the Skyview Tower, a high-rise restaurant marked for destruction the minute this camera alights on the transparent glass dancefloor, one chef's carefree handling of a flambé pan, and the insouciant tyke threatening to toss pennies from the observation balcony. A further warning siren is the song playing at the valet station ("Ring of Fire"); when the bodies start tumbling from the sky, exploding on the surrounding pavements in clouds of CG crimson, the same radio is heard playing "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head". The latter is soon drowned out by the sound of the audience gurgling like drains, which struck me as a weird response for a movie to aspire to in 2000, and seems no less weird in 2025, when we know from lived experience that the planet has long been overrun by sick, soulless, empathy-voided fucks cheering on those executive-level ringmasters plotting the wholesale destruction of humankind.
Look, I get it: these films replicate the same controlled anxiety and collective release as any rollercoaster, yadda yadda. But there's still something so gloating - so gross - about the way the ultra-corporate carnies running this show keep tossing these bodies into the woodchipper, which is all this show ever is and wants to be. A garden party featuring a leaky gas cylinder, a shard of broken glass in the icebox, and a Jenga set. (You'll recognise it: it's been in all the trailers.) A tattoo parlour appointed with nose rings, bobblehead toys and a labouring ceiling fan. A hospital with wobbly vending machines, MRI scanners, and many more bodies besides. The film pushes on through its viscera, permitting no mourning period for any of its characters, none of the usual human markers of loss; a genuinely revolutionary Final Destination movie would at least try and take these people's trauma seriously, but that clearly isn't the film that would fill the multiplex with teenagers and earn David Zaslav his quarterly bonus. (That film, in fact, already exists: 1993's Fearless, made by Peter Weir for Warner Bros. three decades ago, and thereafter allowed to tumble into obscurity as the world turned to hypercapitalised shit.) Bloodlines cops to its baser motives in having its doe-eyed heroine (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) note, of Death's long-term bookbalancing, "It's like an equation... it's math." Carnage (spikes through face) times carnage (lawnmower to head) plus carnage (body in trash compactor) equals $$$, as I'm sure next week's box-office charts will confirm. Is there any bright side for us to look upon? A sendoff of a kind for the late Tony Todd, although the erstwhile Candyman appears so painfully frail, so much the dead man working here, that the primary takehome from his brief cameo isn't the intended life-is-precious so much as that Hollywood exploitation really knows no bounds. You can argue, as many will over the days and weeks ahead, that Bloodlines represents as grand and as elaborate a deathtrap as this series has so far arrived at, and that this is inherently a good thing for the movies and us alike. But once again, all a Final Destination film offers is a procession of grisly images, the option to laugh insensibly at them, and possibly a compulsion to seek out more of the same. If I wanted any part of that, I'd return to my former post on Elon Musk's X.
Final Destination: Bloodlines is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
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