Review: Final Destination Bloodlines (2025)
When a movie reminds you of Hellraiser: Bloodline (1997), it’s never a good thing. Luckily, Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein’s Final Destination Bloodlines is not a dire disaster like that 1997 body horror-science fiction-period piece. But aside from a subtitle, Final Destination Bloodlines also shares with Hellraiser: Bloodline a similar love of lore in a story that needs none. The new film in the Final Destination series, which cleverly pitches Death as the ultimate slasher villain, once again follows a bunch of young folks haunted by Death and dispatched in absurd, complicated ways. It’s competently framed, and coherently made, the sort of film that plays well with a crowd of likeminded people who know what they’re in for. However, it’s all a little too enamoured of itself, like it’s in on the joke of how absurd these films are.
James Wong’s original Final Destination (2000) took itself seriously enough to work as narrative and not just empty spectacle. Even though Final Destination 2 (2003) teeters on the edge of camp, it never crosses over knowingly, like it’s above the material. The brilliance of the iconic highway log trailer scene is that it’s absurd but pitched 100% straight, achieving that sweet spot of being both ridiculous and ridiculously awesome. But Final Destination Bloodlines feels deliberately campy, and thus, too clever by half. It’s like the filmmakers assume audiences don’t expect coherent storytelling or compelling characters in these films because all they want is inventive splatter and clever traps. Therefore, it goes overboard in making the characters dumb and the kills gruesome. I’m not sold on deliberate camp (can it even be camp if it’s deliberate? Go read your Susan Sontag and tell me your thoughts). I enjoy the cleverness of the kills (or should I call them gags?), which are impressively slapstick and sickly, but I was left cold by much of the tone, which is too comedic for something so brutal.
The film does start on a high note. In the 1960s, we see a girl go on a date with her boyfriend to a new high-rise restaurant that looks like the Space Needle or the CN Tower. Through ominous insert shots, Lipovsky and Stein delight in showing us all the ways this will go bad soon enough. The elevator door needs help closing. There’s a bratty kid throwing pennies off the roof. The guy making flambees is too close to the gas vent. The people dancing on the glass dance floor don’t realize a diamond hangs perilously loose on the chandelier above, threatening disaster. There’s an appealing clarity in this scenario as they paint a picture of all the terrible ways things could go wrong, and then unleash that terror as the entire restaurant goes up in flames before coming tumbling down.
But even here, things are a little off. There’s a smoothness to everything on screen that defangs the novelty. The dreadful CGI doesn’t help. I don’t expect every movie to have great effects, but this wasn’t a low budget affair at $50 million. There’s also flat lighting that cannot escape the digital sheen of everything—what I wouldn’t give for this to be shot like an episode of The X-Files or at least the original (which started as a spec script for that show). The presentation achieves an affectation of the past that seems AI generated, with its indistinct sense of time and place in the costumes and set design, which gestures at both the 1950s and 1960s, seemingly blending them together haphazardly. The actors themselves don’t look authentic. The men are too square, with that weird mewing jawline. The women are too broad-eyed and big lipped, like they’re made up from TikTok filters. I respect the effort and the chutzpah of the opening, but it doesn’t sing.
Once we catch up to the present and learn about the cursed descendents of the survivors of that disaster, we get dragged into the unnecessary lore of the series. Thank God Tony Todd shows up briefly for his final film appearance. His haggard, thin appearance, a result of the stomach cancer that would kill him before the film’s release, yet hidden from fellow stars during filming, is startling. But his iconically low voice is still there as is his utter commitment to the scenario. Tony Todd never mocks the material. He never winks at the audience. He gives it his all cause he was a professional. But it’s just one scene.
The rest of the film we’re stuck with annoying young people (what’s new) including the one-note heroine, Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), who immediately thinks that finding her long-lost grandma is the cure for her recurring nightmare, and her disastrously dumb cousins played by Owen Patrick Joyner, Anna Lore, and, worst of all, Richard Harmon. The characters follow the clues to realize that Death is killing off all the descendants of the survivors of the high-rise restaurant disaster one by one and think of ways to cheat death and it’s all very convoluted, the sort of narrative where your eyes start to glaze over the more exposition they give. The plotting also kicks into overdrive immediately, offering the characters (and the drama) nowhere to go. So the tension dissipates any moment where a character isn’t being dispatched.
The set pieces drive most of the tension and interest. To be fair, they’re the whole point of the movie and they’re pretty good. There are a few too many cute callbacks to past films (I don’t think we need another winky nod to the logs on the highway from Final Destination 2 ever again). But the film is entertainingly nasty, fiendish even in how it dispatches characters and contrives the most absurd Rube Goldberg-style machines of death for the various characters on screen. We learn the dangers of MRI machines, icemakers, vending machine springs, and, perhaps most absurdly, pennies. There’s visual wit in putting this together. The gore itself is a bit too garish and ugly, not because of the level of violence but because of the bad CGI rearing its head once again. But at least the key scenes are entertaining which cannot be said for all the Final Destination movies.
If you are entertained by seeing a person crushed to death by a garbage truck trash compactor or want to learn about all the ways that Death could hunt you down, boy, do I have a movie for you. I’m not surprised others enjoy it so much, but I prefer films of this sort to be a bit more sincere, even as they showcase ridiculous absurdities. Even so, it’s middle of the pack in a movie series that is typically entertaining, if not particularly memorable.
5 out of 10
Final Destination Bloodlines (2025, USA)
Directed by Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein; written by Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor, based on a story by Jon Watts, Guy Busick, and Lori Evans Taylor, based on characters by Jeffrey Reddick; starring Kaitlyn Santa Juana, Teo Briones, Richard Harmon, Owen Patrick Joyner, Anna Lore, Brec Bassinger, Tony Todd.
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