Final Destination: Bloodlines

Fuck you, death! Final Destination is back and it would be unfair to call this anything other than a repeat of a repeat, which was a repeat of an already repetitive repeat... But that doesn't matter. Rather, I find it reassuring that there are film sequels that know what they are, know what it takes to be successful, know what the audience wants, and refuse to change a winning concept. Nothing is "final" because there is always more to come and in this case the stubbornness of death is as entertaining as it was in the first two films.

The story is set up in pretty much exactly the same way as always. A woman anticipates mass death, warns lots of people, gets herself to safety, and escapes a one-way ticket to the afterlife. However, death does not give up so easily and after a big time jump from the happy 50s to today, it is clear that the will of death is back to destroy the entire bloodline of the now old lady. Everything will die, everyone is going to die, and it takes cunning and great caution to survive.

Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) returns home to her family to warn them all that death is coming for every last one of them, and that's when the deaths start to unravel, in good old Final Destination order. Much of the appeal of this film series, if you ask me, is the different ways in which people die and Bloodlines is a hit in that regard. Minus the iconic logging truck sequence from Final Destination 2 (incomparably good), I think Bloodlines contains some of the most inventively bizarre and thus entertaining deaths, including when a bimbo gets crushed to death in a garbage truck while the camera stays on her zoomed-in skull, which made me laugh out loud, like a full-blown psychopath.

The acting is hardly the best part of these films, but I don't really have much to complain about here. The characters are paper-thin clichés, or outright caricatures of real people, but it's obviously done on purpose and with a twinkle in both eyes, and the dialogue is as 90s-slasher-silly as it should be, as it always has been - and hopefully will remain. Bloodlines isn't exactly a masterpiece, but it's a film with enough self-awareness and humour that you can't help but give it a "good" rating.