Opening this weekend:
Final Destination: Bloodlines--The format of the Final Destination flicks is that of the slasher movie; the gimmick here is that the killer is an impersonal force: Death Itself. Each movie begins with a spectacular, lovingly presented disaster in which a bunch of young people meet gruesome ends. In the first film (2000) it was a plane crash; later entries featured a highway pile-up, a roller coaster mishap, a raceway catastrophe and a bridge collapse.
In each case these depictions are revealed to be premonitions, which allow the protagonists to avoid their fate, and to prevent several others from suffering it as well. But it turns out that The Grim Reaper is a bit of an OCD completist. The rest of each film consists of Death, or Fate or Destiny or whatever, conspiring to kill these survivors off, in order, through increasingly elaborate chains of events, something like the "accidents" that claimed Damien's enemies in the Omen movies.
This sixth entry opens in the early '60s in an unnamed city that looks a lot like Seattle, in a tower that looks a lot like the Space Needle. After the usual vision, a pretty young woman (Brec Bassinger) averts a fire and disintegration of the tower during its dedication festivities, thus cheating Death not only of herself but of everybody else at the party.
The variation, this time, is that this woman's granddaughter Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) is being haunted in the present day by her grandmother's experience. Stefani gradually realizes that she and all of grandma's descendants and the bloodlines of everyone spared that day are fated to untimely ends. Her Uncle and cousins and Mom and brother are all on the clock, as is she.
Despite its somehow vaguely Calvinist worldview, the series has had a lightly tongue-in-cheek tone from the start, and it's grown more facetious as it's gone on. The death sequences have become gory Rube Goldberg Mousetrap Game-style slapstick set pieces, and the audience hoots at them happily.
The journeyman actors are pleasant company, but not so much that you overinvest in them as real people, and can't giggle at what happens to them. Besides, as with so many recent splatter movies that seem to rely heavily on CGI (Cocaine Bear, Renfield, Thanksgiving, Heart Eyes), the gore effects feel insubstantial and carry little punch, beyond the comic.
There's no denying the inventiveness that directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein, working from a script by Guy Busick, Lori Evans Taylor and Jon Watts, bring of some of these scenes, presented with the heartless glee of an EC horror comic. I certainly can't claim that none of them made me chuckle. But the movie suffers from diminishing returns, and it weighs the silly premise down with too much literalism. It also cheats a little, killing off a character supposedly exempt from the curse, and then lamely explaining it away.
I suppose I can also admit that there was an irritating element of hardship duty for me in the tower scenes here; I'm not great with heights. A few years ago I visited the Space Needle and, while my daughter cavorted happily on the glass floors, I could just barely stick a toe out over that dizzying drop. Having my phobias justified by this movie was not especially gratifying.
One actor makes a vivid impression: Tony Todd, a recurring presence in the franchise, shows up to provide some exposition toward the end, and gets to deliver a lovely little encomium to the preciousness of life as his exit speech. Partly because the actor, who looks thin and gaunt, passed on last November, it gives the movie a more touching moment than it probably deserves. Bloodlines isn't without entertainment value, but I hope that this truly is the final destination for this quarter-century-spanning series. Joke's over.
