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'Final Destination: Bloodlines' briefing

5/16/2025

2 (out of 4)

“Death don’t like to be cheated” — neither do I.

I’m no slasher savant, no gore guru. There are few horror franchises that speak to me spooky-style in the way that Final Destination has always found my fancy. Those first three flicks, trashy and tasteless as they appear, are diverting, death-dodging scare-spectacles, maxing out the formula of an inciting accident as big as a Bond opener, with a second-sight protagonist saving a crew of teens and/or misfit strangers who quickly realize they’re not out of disaster’s direction considering God or the universe (or whatever leaky, short-circuiting, Wile E. Coyote threat it might be) cut through them like an assassin with an agenda. It’s a premise so good, so malleable even the bad ones are entertaining. even in something as punishing as that putrid fourth entry, you're still out in 80 minutes — Bloodlines, the sixth installment and first to subtitle, is the most needlessly long of the franchise, the most foolishly insistent on forcing a plot and also, unsuitably, stocked with fewer setups, payoffs and crafty ways to meet your chosen maker than any before, and only a handful are kinda clever.

So just like the other week with Thunderbolts*, I’m scratching my head truly wondering what critics are smoking as they act like these sequels are emblematic of breathing life into dormant or near-dormant franchises. I’m struggling to figure out whether this tops the fifth, easily second worst to The Final Destination for continuing the tacky Avatar-era 3D kills like it’s the 50s. Final Destination 5 was also needlessly deemed a comeback for the brand, but after the arsenic palette cleanser of 4 it was inevitable — nowadays I guess people felt hungry after the franchise’s 15-year absence coming off a quintet of movies in a decade. Bloodlines skimps on kills but it also scrubs out much of the campy, gnarly black humor that makes something like 2003’s Final Destination 2 the easy favorite (to the point of crude fan service punctuating this lazy legacyquel, apart, of course, from the late Tony Todd) and one of modern horror’s great guilty pleasures. Often, the simmering existentialism these movies never think too hard about (adjacent to the idea that death accidentally lets his plans slip every so often) gets dropped right around Todd’s cameo, though he was absent from the third and fourth parts… His ‘character’ William Bludworth gets folded into our backstory, where death has been at bay because in her youth the protagonist's grandma's saved him (along with dozens), but where’s that payoff, eh movie? Maybe part seven would’ve been Todd’s great death, instead he left us offscreen.

I can’t decide whether I like a scream queen in FD or would rather stick with a sweaty paranoid boy like the OG dude (Devon Sawa) or the milquetoast white boys that led the show in 4 (Nick O'Bannon) and 5 (Nicholas D'Agosto), maybe I just answered my own question — A. J. Cook from 2 and Mary Elizabeth Winstead from 3 try to sell the shlock in tough, unsexualized roles (Ali Larter and her midriff took the brunt in the first), and but this new girl Stephani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) here has the same task (and a permanent constipated look) but it just doesn’t work if our lead ain’t the witness of the inciting vision. I like this lengthy prologue's Towering Inferno-esque opening set piece enough, despite overambitious, tacky CGI. But when death can come knocking in seemingly any random Rube Goldberg / Grand Guignol / Cartoon Network sense possible, I’m sorry but anyone able to start and raise a family (as in push out two children COMPLICATION-FREE) can’t also be a paranoid recluse if she knows how low she is on killer karma’s laundry list.

That MRI sequence was the best situation and a good payoff for a suspected survivor who might get off scott free had he not tried to intervene in the precious sequence of life-taking. In fact, even dumber than the regular revelation that the inciting bloody calamity's order of casualties is how death comes at you later, Stephani thinks she has the order figured out based on a family tree? Like it’ll work through one branch than the other, and by AGE? Sorry, WHAT? HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT? So 6 is so stuck on surpassing formula that it only suffers more from its shorter supply of nasty humor, decently memorable invisi-murder and any twists on outsmarting the reaper — at least they pursue 2’s cheat code for survival (just die and be resuscitated, simple!) more than 5 suggesting straight up murder itself will spare you. All your legacy sequel (squared) does for WB is mimic what Paramount has done with Scream this decade, trick everyone that a recently nostalgic serial killer series was worth waking from the dead.

'Thunderbolts*' briefing

5/2/2025

1 ½ (out of 4)

Kevin Feige you son of a bitch, I just knew that asterisk was up to no good. But I had no idea you would assume the most obvious twist of all time — so obvious you had to spoil that the THUNDERBOLTS are now THE NEW AVENGERS before the movie even came out — could win us over in the end even if scruffy, scrappy heart did not. I didn’t guess what you actually wanted was to innocuously, comprehensively rebrand everything in order to resuscitate the regularly declining interest in what’s left of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, uh, sorry but this ain’t no Guardians of the Galaxy (any Volume) even if it wants to be. A Minecraft Movie probably handled the “bickering misfits who must learn to work together in the end” routine better than Thunderbolts*.

I really don’t get it, who could genuinely claim this movie is saving, rescuing, ahem avenging ANYTHING, let alone the MCU? ‘bolts is such a comically slight, self-admitting shrug of a movie, an entertainment insult excusing itself with crude psychological commentary. I’m quite astounded any sane person could see this as a rebound, “the best since Endgame!” I’m sorry are you on crack? You astroturfing me bro? Thunderbolts* is a most pathetic meta-acknowledgement of the MCU’s rut — it’s somehow more direct than Deadpool & Wolverine’s digs last year about stewing in the universally accepted “low point” of 2020s Marvel movies.

The biggest draw — the bored Sebastian Stan as Bucky — is still some suit, doing roughly nothing two movies straight. Taskmaster is ironically capped IMMEDIATELY, don’t even bother checking if Bond girl #57 Olga Kurylenko is still beneath the suit. I got the best of the emotional play between Florence Pugh’s Yelena and David Harbor’s Red Guardian in Black Widow. Then heck yeah, there’s a THIRD super soldier in Wyatt Russell’s sub-Cap’n ’Murica — wow so many versions of the same brooding, quipping grumpy gills, likewise for the pretty neat Ant-Man and the Wasp villain Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) that you sideline, just another frowning reprobate in need of redemption along with every one of her interchangeable co-characters… Something’s cooking in the first act just as our cruddy cavalcade of mercenaries realize they criss-cross on each other’s hit-lists and cooperate for survival to break out of an oversized death trap, but Thunderbolts* then promptly hits the snooze button on becoming a creditable comic book adventure all the way until its grotesque mid-credit denouement has overstayed welcome.

This is stepping-stone Marvel at its most meandering and mundane, and Phase Four and Five have basically been the stepping stone saga (anyone still multiverse-hungry should die) rearing the infinity one. But even next to the recent MCU misfires that left me most disappointed, I’m still baffled here — for current contrast, Captain America: Brave New World was more involving and cohesive than this drab clusterfuck deplete of grace, action goodies and anything other than pandering thematics in hand with yet another bad guy in need of some super-therapy. The time to pull out and prop up D-list characters was whenever you hired James Gunn, whose riskier ridiculousness was tethered by Guardians’ mission to win you over somehow, if annoyingly so. This shit thinks that with tepid, tactless discussions and depictions of depression it can be INSTANTLY RELATABLE OMG ALSO LET ME SHIP YELENA AND SENTRY.

Poor director Jake Schreier is rolled right into the Disney pulverizer, his light hand lost after guiding and getting the best of odd ensembles in both geriatric android buddy comedies (Robot & Frank) and even peak pointless, insipid YA adaptations (John Green’s Paper Towns). Here Schreier is virtually voiceless — what did you nab him for, the emo faux-poignant shit specifically? Marvel and themes don’t mix, and when they did it was never as clumsy and embarrassing to hear and witness, this was almost worse than the big bear of emotion at the end of the similarly desperate demi-reboot New Mutants. The bang for your buck in Marvelville and most major flicks is sheer entertainment value, HELLO! NOT goddamn teen novel coming-of-age pretension like “it’s OK to be sad” and “you have to literally face your fears, except don’t face your fears, oh no facing your fears was a trap!” WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?!

No, Thunderbolts* is a structurally, ideologically confused mess. There’s also something about the tone and self-awareness that is especially distasteful to me: “This isn’t a marketing opportunity” Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s Nega-Nick Fury string-puller transparently remarks. Are you messing with me? That’s all this is, feigning the arrival of something BRAND NEW but trojan-horse-ing the same ol’ shit as always in some reverse mystery box. Come expecting fresh and unexpected only to settle for stale leftovers — it's just too ironic how empty the 36th MCU misadventure is considering the cute cereal box marketing, there’s no sustenance, no prize, not even a plastic bag. At this point they’ll try to shill us Jon Favreau’s Happy movie, YES all the MCU periphery will become the focal, don’t worry we’re definitely not creatively grasping at straws and leaving audiences to gnaw on substandard scraps!

While before I could say The Fantastic Four: First Steps was a ”finally!” moment for capeshitters, at some point these past several months I realized I couldn’t care less. Why admit you’ve peaked when you can’t even regularly pretend to give it your all, to hell with whatever Fox property crossovers you have up your sleeve. Even divorced from the advertising, Thunderbolts* wants to act like it’s this big surprise, ready to sweep people off their feet. Coming out the other end it’s possibly the most charmless, underwhelming ”blockbuster” I’ve ever seen in my life — eh if The Marvels didn’t exist.

Cinema Briefing

'Final Destination: Bloodlines' briefing

'Thunderbolts*' briefing

To keep it brief...

Months in movies

Kino
of the Crop
(A recent selection of
consummate classics)

Cinema Briefing

'Final Destination: Bloodlines' briefing

'Thunderbolts*' briefing

To keep it brief...

Months in movies

Kinoof the Crop(A recent selection ofconsummate classics)

Kino
of the Crop
(A recent selection of
consummate classics)