Disaster at the Sky View Tower! Final Destinations: Bloodlines (2025)
Intensity 🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Directed by Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein
Written by Guy Busick, Lori Evans Taylor, and Jon Watts
Final Destination has taught us that you can’t cheat death. In Bloodlines, we reset the clock back to what might be the original sin for cheating death. It is 1969, and the site of the impending disaster is the Space Needle-like Sky View Tower. As is tradition for this series, a premonition of disaster saves all the would-be victims. Death is nothing if not patient, and it pursues the lucky survivors… and their descendants. This was a breath of fresh air into a series that had become stale.
Full admission: I have been critical of the Final Destination franchise. As a result, I received a fair amount of backlash (though I wear that like a badge of honor). I have always appreciated the central disaster scenes of each of the movies, but I frequently found the protagonists frustratingly thin in character development. I also felt that the amusing Rube Goldberg-like puzzles of death were too clever for their own good and came at the expense of good storytelling. With Bloodlines, the writing is better, and the characters have a little more depth.
Final Destination Bloodlines is a confident movie, willing to break its own rules. As a result, the movie provides surprises without feeling forced, which has been a challenge in the previous iterations. And, as a bonus, we get one last trip with the great Tony Todd.
The Cast of Final Destination: Bloodlines:
- Kaitlyn Santa Luana plays Stefani Reyes, a college student haunted by the premonitions of her grandmother, who has returned home to understand why she is having these nightmare visions.
- Tio Briones plays Charlie Reyes, Stefani’s little brother, who resents being in Stefani’s shadow.
- Rya Kihstedt plays Darlene Campbell, Stafani and Charlie’s mother, who abandoned them to protect them from the spectre of death.
- Richard Harmon plays Erik, Stefani’s cynical oldest cousin, who works in a tattoo parlour.
- Anna Lore plays Julia, Stefani’s athletic middle cousin, who is skeptical of Stefani’s dire warnings. The two used to be close, but now the relationship is strained.
- Owen Patrick Joyner plays Bobby, the youngest and most carefree of Stefani’s cousins. He has a turtle and a severe peanut allergy.
- Brec Bassinger plays Iris, whose 1969 premonition both saved dozens of SkyView guests and, as a result, doomed them.
- Gabrielle Rose plays Iris in the current timeline. She has become maniacally defensive and cautious. She has written a manifesto on cheating death.
- Max Lloyd Jones plays Paul Campbell, who plans on proposing to Iris at the grand opening of the SkyView Tower.
- Alex Zahara plays Uncle Howard, Darlene’s brother, who was raised in a fearful household due to Iris’ paranoid protection.
- Tony Todd returns as William “JB” Bludworth, a coroner who knows the inner secrets of cheating death better than anyone alive.
A Synopsis of Final Destination: Bloodlines
Turn back the clock to the opening day of the SkyView Tower, a kissing cousin of the Space Needle or the CN Tower. At its top is a fancy restaurant, and young Paul and Iris have reservations for dinner. Unfortunately for them, they got bumped from their reservation, so they took to the dance floor. A cascade of small, seemingly innocuous events happens in the background as the pair head to the dance floor. As Paul presents his proposal ring to Iris, disaster strikes. The glass dance floor collapses, bolts from the primary structural frame come undone, and an explosion rocks the restaurant. Bodies ripped apart, patrons plummet hundreds of feet to the plaza below, and fires turn dancers into torches. Iris and Paul perish horribly in the calamity.
Fast forward 25 years. Stefani Reyes awakes abruptly in the middle of a college class. She has been struggling with nightmare visions of the Tower disaster, and, under the threat of failing out of college, she returns home to discover the source of them. Stefani realizes that Iris may be her maternal grandmother. Her father deflects questions about her mother’s mysterious past, directing her to talk with her Uncle Howard, who may have some answers.
The Final Destination Factor
But this is Final Destination. Iris didn’t die. An alternate version of the disaster rewinds. Iris, rather than taking to the dance floor, pauses, as images of the impending disaster flood her mind. She warns the dancers off the glass floor just as it starts to crack. She saved the day…. for now. Stefani finds Iris hiding in a remote compound with fortress-like defenses built up to stave off Death. She hands Callie her tome of notes on how to beat the damning fate. To prove her theories to Stefani, she sacrifices herself in front of Stefani in a storm, to be impaled by a weather vane.
Death arrives at a Campbell family picnic. So many opportunities for fate to strike hard. A loose rake under a trampoline. A shard of broken glass in the beverage ice. A glitchy BBQ gas connection. A rogue lawnmower. All the components are set up for a Rube Goldbergian tragedy. The shots linger on every detail. The Campbell family seemingly defuses and avoids each unforeseen trap, but fate has a way of bringing the pain.
Death is approaching in the order that it claimed the victims in the should-have-been disaster, and the Campbell family is the last in the line. It comes for each family in birth order: oldest to youngest. Stefani pieces this mystery together, but until the next family member is claimed, the rest of the family is incredulous until the freakish accidents become too clear to ignore. Darlene’s fearful predictions have become true, and she and Stefani form a plan to combat fate by seeking the one man who has beaten the odds: JB Bludworth, a veteran of the series, and the fount of death-dodging suggestions. It turns out he was a little boy, and the last victim of the fate-cheated disaster. Perhaps this group of survivors can stop Death just like him.
Evaluation:
Final Destination Bloodlines bears all the hallmarks of what made the series popular. A spectacular set piece disaster. Significant foreshadowing of death’s design. Elaborate and preposterous puzzles of death. And, gratuitous, often silly gore. These elements, before, sometimes felt like a gimmick. This time, they executed the films better than in earlier franchise installments. The protagonists are more fleshed out and have at least the skeleton of a background. The motivations are solid, and the story’s logic holds… for the most part.
Most importantly, it nails the set pieces. The tower sequence and the BBQ sequence are some of the best executed scenes in the whole series. These scenes are wildly entertaining, feinting and dodging, then sticking the proverbial knife in at the perfect moment. The editing and pacing are particularly well edited, full of winks and gleeful potential energy. However, even after all these years, these showpieces are CGI-heavy, and the budget still doesn’t allow for Jurassic Park-level graphics, and the uncanny valley is clearly evident.
The best part of the movie, because of the spectacle, is the second act /middle third. The carefully crafted character development falls apart late in the movie, and death’s cleverness slides a bit. Some of my qualms about the try-too-hard nature of the previous iterations pop up at the end. However, the strengths overcome the weaknesses, because in the end, you care about the characters… or at least, most of them.
Concluding Thoughts
I underestimated this film. I was ready not to like it, as I had with its predecessors. It won me over with its self-aware creativity. The story zigged when I expected it to zag. I tip my hat to the creatives at Final Destination Bloodlines. They exceeded my expectations and injected new vigor into a flagging franchise. Exuberantly wicked and using gory violence to great amusement, this version of Final Destination is a fun and sly crowd-pleasing spectacle. It probably is not the smartest film you will see this year, but it might be among the most entertaining.
Final Destination Bloodlines is rated R for strong/grisly violence and language. As gory as it is, this film isn’t particularly traumatizing because of its violence (much of it is wildly goofy and humorous) and would likely be a teen favorite, given the cast’s youth.
Review by Eric Li
