There are few certainties in life: death, taxes, and studio-mandated franchise reboots, remakes, or sequels. The first and the third apply to Final Destination: Bloodlines, the sixth entry in a series that began with a one-off entry twenty-five years ago and continued across five entries and 11 years. Fatally eroded by creative inertia and growing audience disinterest, the series’s commercially-minded producers followed the not unfamiliar franchise fatigue formula: They dispatched the series into temporary hibernation, awaiting the day when horror-friendly, nostalgic audiences, signalled their willingness to see — and more importantly, pay for — a new entry.
Presumably, the preceding paragraph explains the thinking behind resurrecting a series that was better left at the five-entry mark. Short on imagination and invention and long on predictably formulaic filmmaking, entry number six opens in semi-spectacular fashion, with the disastrous collapse of a sleekly modernist restaurant-in-the-sky, the Skyview Tower, in 1968. Except, of course, it never happened, or rather it does, but only as part of a life-altering premonition experienced by an agoraphobic twenty-something woman, Iris (Brec Bassinger), moments before the disaster proper unfolds.
Apparently built before the advent of reasonable building and/or fire-safety codes, the five-hundred-foot structure modelled on Seattle’s Space Needle dramatically collapses, albeit only in Iris’s incredibly detailed premonition, leaving the dismembered, shattered bodies of the partygoers strewn on the ground below. Staged with ruthlessly efficient anonymity by co-directors, Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein (Kim Possible, Freaks), the opening set piece gives the audience a sour taste of things to come: Surface-deep ideas cribbed from earlier entries, and unwitting characters picked off one-by-one by the sadistically cruel personification of Death, all undermined by under-rendered, cartoonish CGI. It’s almost enough to make practical effects-loving horror fans cry. More optimistic horror fans, though, will likely just grin and bear, hoping the smaller-scaled set pieces (i.e., the Rube Goldberg-inspired death scenes) won’t disappoint.
Alas, with one or two exceptions, they do. Each diminishes whatever shock or scares Lipovsky and Stein try to conjure up with a severely limited budget. Said death scenes punctuate a routine, by-the-numbers screenplay co-written by Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor, involving another one-and-done protagonist, Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), a college student suddenly beset by her grandmother’s premonition-turned-nightly-nightmare. Disoriented, dazed, and debilitated by the nightly nightmare, falling behind in her studies, and irritating her roommate, Stefani decides only going home, reconnecting with her family, and more importantly, sitting down with her long-lost grandmother, Iris (Gabrielle Rose), will give her the answers she desperately needs and wants. (Generational trauma alert.)
Reconnecting with Iris, an ostracized outsider, proves harder than expected, especially with her father, Marty (Tinpo Lee), and Howard (Alex Zahara), Iris’s son, and Brenda (April Telek), Howard’s wife, and their three children, Erik (Richard Harmon), Bobby (Owen Patrick Joyner), and Julia (Anna Lore), resistant to the idea of a family reunion. Stefani’s growing obsession with the premonition and her grandmother, not to mention the obvious demands of a Final Destination plot, dictates otherwise. Stefani will — and does — find her grandmother, and the results of their meeting will impact her family, not as intended and not for the better.
As with every other entry in the Final Destination series, once the new cast of characters learn the Grim Reaper has marked them for an early, usually bloody, demise, it’s a narrative race to uncover how the curse works and how to stop it before Stefani and her family find themselves on the wrong side of the grass at their local cemetery. The second character’s exit might be the best, if only (or mostly) because it’s the most novel, a journey through a backyard’s obvious and not-so-obvious dangers, including a possibly defective trampoline, a gas-powered grill, and an electric lawn mower, a favourite among horror writers and fans for combining maximum carnage and minimal screen time whenever it makes an appearance.
Hampered by rote, uninspired storytelling, a shortage of original ideas lore-wise, and the aforementioned under-rendered CGI for its set pieces, Final Destination: Bloodlines feels less like the first in a new, revived series than the last gasp of a once relevant franchise that should have ended more than a decade ago. Box-office results and nothing, of course, the future of the franchise. Hopefully, audiences will choose wisely.
Final Destination: Bloodlines opens theatrically on Friday, May 16, via New Line Cinema and Warner Bros. Pictures.
