The Final Destination horror franchise had a successful start and a string of sequels in the early 2000s. The first movie tried to establish a little mystery about how Death, as an invisible entity, finds a way to come back and claim people who managed to escape their fate the first time. Each subsequent movie went further down the route of coming up with new methods to kill people in creative Rube-Goldberg-machine ways. It’s a formula that became very familiar to fans, and by the third film, the overall quality started to drop off. Still, you knew what you were getting when you watched one of those movies. The experience was so predictable in certain ways that it was easy to create a drinking game for it.

However, the last entry in the series was released in 2011, when interest in the Final Destination movies was starting to wane. 14 years later, the franchise is back from the dead with Final Destination: Bloodlines. Was the hiatus long enough to reinvigorate interest in this long-dead movie series? Will new aspects be added to the tried and true Final Destination formula? The answers may just surprise you. Or will they?

Pros

Creative and shocking deaths; some are set up very early in the film and are finally completed at the end
The premonition sequence is fun and full of hilarious catastrophes
Some characters are actually likable in a horror movie about everyone dying
Dialogue that provides details for setup and payoff scenarios
Surprisingly funny at times
Less than two hours long

Cons

Gore effects and green screen effects look surprisingly bad in a lot of scenes
Doesn’t really do anything new for the franchise; predictable
Questionable logic
Plot points and certain (alive) characters just drop out of the movie

Plot & Thoughts

The film opens in the 1960s with a young blonde named Iris (Brec Bassinger) being surprised by her boyfriend, Paul (Max Lloyd-Jones). He’s brought her to an exclusive restaurant that has just opened, called the Skyview. Similar in shape to the Seattle Space Needle, the restaurant sits atop an extremely tall tower. Its construction was completed five months ahead of schedule and is so exclusive that only the elites are allowed entry. Paul, however, knows a guy and managed to get reservations, at least, until he meets the rude Maitre d’, who tells him that his reservation was canceled and Paul’s friend was fired. That doesn’t stop the couple from sticking around, though. They navigate the dance floor, grab a few drinks, and gaze out at the green-screen landscape from the top of the tower, where Paul proposes and Iris breaks the news that she’s pregnant. Unfortunately for them, all that happiness ends abruptly when the dance floor starts to crack, a random penny stops a fan, causing a gas leak, and people start dramatically dying. At the end of the calamity, with everyone dead, including Paul and Iris, the perspective suddenly shifts to Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), who wakes up in the modern day from her nightmare in the middle of a college math class, screaming.

If you are not familiar with the Final Destination movies, each film starts with a person who has a premonition of some catastrophic event that is going to claim the lives of several people, including the person experiencing the vision. After the premonition plays out, the person with the vision then attempts to warn those involved in their dream of their impending doom, averting disaster and saving lives. What then occurs is that Death, irritated that people were able to avoid their end, systematically circles back around and starts killing people off in the order in which they were supposed to originally die. The deaths usually appear to be accidents to the average spectator in the movie, but they’re often the result of numerous small circumstances, caused by an invisible force or just carelessness from the characters, which all coalesce in a rapid sequence of events that violently kill one or multiple victims. Much of the fun is in predicting how each of these characters is going to meet their end and watching the Rube Goldberg machine at work.

The same is true in Final Destinations: Bloodlines, except that the vision that Stefani has is not of her own fate, as was the case in the previous films. It was the vision of her grandmother, Iris (Gabrielle Rose). Iris had managed to save all the people at the Skyview restaurant that night in the ‘60s. So many people were saved that it took Death a long time to come back around and eliminate the survivors. Enough time had passed that many of the survivors had children and grandchildren before Death was able to start eliminating them. Death was not about to let its design be ruined by some frisky survivors, however, as it began to systematically kill off the people who were at the Skyview as well as their descendants, one family at a time. Since Iris was the second-to-last person to die in her vision, and all the other families of the survivors have been eliminated, her family would be Death’s next stop. Unfortunately for Stefani, that meant that if Iris died, she, her brother, her uncle, her mother, and her cousins would all be on Death’s hit list, hence the subtitle of Bloodlines.

The idea of Death killing off people who weren’t supposed to exist, in addition to the previous survivors, is the newest thing that Bloodlines brings to the franchise. Everything else about it is pretty predictable and familiar. That doesn’t ruin the experience, however, as I quite enjoyed Bloodlines. The big calamity at the beginning was on par with some of the better opening disaster sequences in the franchise. The ways characters met their ends were creative, gruesome, and entertaining. The story moved at a brisk pace to keep things under two hours. And, I have to give credit to the writers for doing some things right that normally don’t happen in horror movies like this. They had lines of dialogue to justify certain character abilities that would be used later in the film, like Stefani’s brother, Charlie (Teo Briones), taking lifeguard courses. There were also some characters whom I found entertaining and was sorry to see them die. I know it’s a low bar, but credit where it is due.

Where Final Destinations: Bloodlines misses the mark is in the quality of its presentation. The green screen effects, particularly while at the Skyview restaurant, look impressively bad for 2025 special effects. Likewise, a lot of digital effects were used in the various deaths of the different characters. Some of which looked okay because they were brief. There were some, however, that looked awful, and the camera lingered on them too long. One of which would have been better if they just replaced the digital representation of a person’s head with a physical watermelon and drew a face on it; it looked so bad. This movie was made for an estimated $50 million, so it didn’t have the budget of a Star Wars or MCU film, but Godzilla Minus One had better effects and was made for a fourth of the cost, so it doesn’t have an excuse. Bloodlines, nonetheless, made its money back at the box office on opening weekend, so clearly the 14-year break helped bring demand for these movies back up again.

Digital effects aside, this movie is still a fun time. The process of anticipating how the next person is killed off continues to be entertaining. Some of it comes down to characters making some dumb decisions—one piece of logic, in particular, didn’t make sense to me, like how a character had managed to escape death for years by surrounding themselves with spiky things—but it doesn’t change the fact that you’re getting what you expect out of this movie.

The last thing worth mentioning is that this would be the last appearance of the franchise favorite, Tony Todd. Todd has been in countless movies, most notably the Candyman and Final Destination horror films. He only has one scene in Bloodlines, and it’s heartbreaking to see because he’s clearly unwell with his frail appearance. Nonetheless, as he walks out the door and out of the scene, he gives the ominous speech and performance he was always known for in these movies. It’s a nice sendoff to a legendary actor who will surely be missed in the horror genre.

TL;DR

Final Destinations: Bloodlines is not a return to form, but a return to the formula. It brings only a few new things to the table, but it is, nonetheless, exactly what you were expecting. That’s okay because it manages to achieve what was intended. It’s dumb, gory fun, with some actual effort put into the writing we don’t normally get in movies these days. If you never liked this franchise before, you’re not going to change your mind watching this one. However, if you’re looking for another popcorn horror film in a familiar format, it’s a fun time.

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