Final Destination: Bloodlines

 

I am unabashed in my affection for the Final Destination franchise, whose pedigree extends back to the beloved X-files TV series and film.

As I told a friend, I'm a fan of the movies' commitment to the conceit that Death is a relentless hunter and humans are the game. Some of the game try mightily to outwit the hunter and might successfully delay being bagged, but, in the end, the hunter will win. Well, we ARE talking about Death here.

Death as an invisible but sentient force is off-putting to some, and I can appreciate that, but this creation is not original to this 25-year-old franchise. In fact, Final Destination clearly draws from classical myths about the Fates, the goddesses of destiny who stood above all other deities.

In Bloodlines, audiences -- who come for the creative gore more than the story, which, again, is pretty much set -- are introduced to an extended family whose grandparents escaped death back in the '60s because of a premonition.

College student Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) is failing her courses because she can't sleep, her dreams interrupted by scenes of people dying in a catastrophic disaster in a tower restaurant called The Skyview.

Directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein stage a long but impressive opening sequence that is unmatched by any of the individual "reckoning" moments to follow. Still, it whets the appetite for a feast of tension and "tongue-in-cheekery". The movie is loaded with visual and musical puns. (You'll never hear the Isley Brothers' "Shout" or any of the other music in this picture quite the same. LOL)

Stefani meets with her grandmother Iris (Gabrielle Rose), whose premonition at The Skyview saved many lives from being lost in the tower collapse. Iris has been locked away in a fortress that keeps Death at bay; but Death has been playing catch-up and reaping the descendants of those who survived and Iris has been keeping track. It's not clear at this point how she's been doing this since she never leaves her home. In fact, we must take it on faith that she's been able to get food and other vitals without human contact for 30 years.

As the Fates would have it, Iris is brutally killed in one of Death's ingeniously diabolical Rube Goldberg convoluted Mousetrap-y devices (for those who remember both Goldberg and the board game), leaving her granddaughter covered in bloody goo and holding a book that Iris said might change her family's fate.

On the matter of the family -- an assortment of annoying Boomers and Z-ers -- they all seem to be addled and vacuous, incautious and weary of dire warnings of Death descending. They're easy to like for their comedic appeal and not difficult to say goodbye to, as is inevitable.

Amidst all of the death and devastation, writers Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor have inserted some grace notes about family unity that sweeten, just a bit, the bitterness of watching death by lawnmower, MRI and runaway train, but doesn't turn the movie into a sentimental goo.

It's gooey, yes, but not sentimental, except in Tony Todd's appearance as William Bludworth, a medical examiner and one of The Skyview survivors who worked with Iris to create her fortress and track the deaths. Todd was actually in the final stages of cancer when he filmed his scenes for Bloodlines and died in November.