'Final Destination: Bloodlines' briefing

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.