The Final Destination series is a perfect example of why it’s usually a bad idea for me to review a movie right after I’ve seen it. Until I get the chance to ruminate on it for a while, I’m either too positive about it1I actually said I really liked Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. What’s up with that?!, or I’m too negative about it.
I absolutely love the gimmick behind the series, but I was way too dismissive of them initially, and I’ve tried to set the record straight in recent years. In fact, after being too dismissive, I got weirdly possessive of the franchise enough that I never saw the fourth one, for some dumb reason like thinking it was way too early to be doing a reboot.
But in my defense, it often seems like the filmmakers aren’t quite sure what they think of the franchise, either. They seem a little bit reluctant to fully embrace the idea that these are almost black comedies as much as they are horror/suspense movies. The third has long been my favorite, because it felt like they leaned into the fact that it’s all absurd, without ever devolving fully into camp.
I’ve heard that the fifth installment gets the tone right, but I’ll never see it because it has a set piece involving LASIK surgery, which is my biggest can’t-handle.2Lots of horror posters seem to involve eye trauma over the past few years, and I wish they’d cut it out.
So I completely loved Final Destination: Bloodlines, which might be the best realization of the franchise’s premise. It was so much fun. And the horror isn’t diminished by the sense of humor, since the most horrific scenes are also inherently the funniest. I was laughing out loud while I was cringing, covering my eyes, and trying to crawl into the theater seat. Not to mention frequently reflexively covering up the most sensitive parts of my body like a hot woman in a shower in a teen sex comedy.
Also, I’m grateful to this movie for putting a permanent end to the notion that I might someday want to get a septum ring.
The best example of how the movie hits exactly the right combination of suspense and comedy is the opening set piece, which perfectly sets the tone for everything that’s to follow. It’s a staple of the franchise to start the movie with an elaborate disaster, the scale of which has increased from movie to movie. This one — following a Laura Linney-esque protagonist on a momentous date to the top of a Space Needle-inspired building — is especially drawn out. Not even so much for the scenes of disaster, but for moment after moment after moment of perfectly-executed foreshadowing. In fact, this one goes so far that it’s fiveshadowing.
Lines like “I think I’ll live” and “I’ll hang onto you” and “for the rest of my life.” An over-stuffed elevator that doesn’t seem to be functioning. A snooty maitre’d who you’re just waiting to meet a grisly fate. A tower whose groaning superstructure you can hear from the floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows. An out-of-control flambé. A glass dance floor. A chandelier shedding crystals onto the glass. A band performing a raucous version of “Shout” and encouraging the dancers to stomp on the floor. As the tension builds, there’s a mind-blowingly great sequence of quick cuts showing threats around the restaurant, including a guest cracking the top of a creme brûlée, and a carver slicing up prime rib.
And a running story of just the shittiest kid, starting with him getting yelled at for pulling a penny out of a fountain.
This sequence, and the way it’s perfectly in sync with what the audience is thinking, and the way it sadistically stretches out the tension, are a perfect encapsulation of what makes the Final Destination series so brilliant. It’s not just a case of planning out an elaborate death sequence, and it’s not even just a case of hinting at all the ways a character might possibly die in this scene. It’s knowing exactly how long to hold a moment, exactly how to plant an image in the audience’s mind that will continue to linger for the next several minutes, and exactly how to strike the right balance between suspense, horror, and comedy.
And that sequence isn’t even my favorite thing about the movie, which is a spoiler. I will say that my only criticism of the movie is that so much of it is in the trailers and teasers, so if you’re lucky enough not to have watched them yet, avoid the promotional stuff until after you’ve seen the movie. There are still some great surprises, but it did lessen the tension when I’d already seen a couple of the best set pieces.
And while it was my biggest complaint, I also think my favorite sequence in the movie worked because of exactly that.
One of the issues with the first three Final Destination movies is that movie plots dictate that the characters have to do something. Or at least try to. Otherwise, they’re just wandering around, waiting to get killed. We in the audience know that that’s what these movies are at their core, but the suspense doesn’t work unless the characters believe they have a way to make it out alive.
The first one managed to get a couple of interesting scenes of Devon Sawa’s character hiding away in a cabin, completely overwhelmed by paranoia and noticing every possible mundane thing that could kill him. But that’s not sustainable. The movies always seem to get to the point where they’ve used up all their energy and end up just waiting for the inevitable.
Before the backyard barbecue scene that became the “main” trailer for Bloodlines, there was a teaser that had the bulk of the scene in the tattoo parlor. I remember seeing it the first time and getting about a minute in when I thought, this feels a lot like a Final Destination movie! I’d assumed — as I was supposed to — that that scene would end in the character’s death.
Later trailers had a shot of the same character scoffing at our protagonist and walking backwards into the street, right as a truck comes barreling in from off screen. I assumed — as I was supposed to — that the teaser had been a fake-out, and what actually kills him is a callback to the well-known bus scene from the first movie.
But that was a fake-out, too, and it feels like there’s something even more drawn-out and grisly in store for him. We already know the rules of the franchise — Bloodlines brilliantly gets this out of the way quickly, with a character straight-up handing the protagonist a book that contains all the rules collected over five movies — so we know that he’s next to go. And he’s not wandering around unaware that he’s been marked for death; he’s openly flaunting it.
This was the moment I really appreciated how much the filmmakers were screwing with me. It’s so perfectly drawn out, as we not only see the potential threats, but have a character explicitly point them out. Meanwhile, he’s defiantly mocking the rules, slapping the side of a potentially deadly garbage truck before, hilariously, humping one of the huge tires. We’re left anticipating a punchline that never seems to come, and it seems to go on for so long. Much like the penny kid from the opening sequence, he seems to be the one character most deserving a grisly death, but the movie keeps showing us that he’s indestructible. (Until he isn’t, of course).
I would’ve thought that the franchise had used up all the potential energy of its premise by this point, and there’d be nothing more than seeing it play out in different ways. And to be clear, I would’ve been happy with that, as long as it was done as skillfully and hilariously as it is in Bloodlines. Even knowing how the barbecue scene plays out from repeatedly seeing the trailer, I still thought it was morbidly satisfying.
But Bloodlines goes all-in on knowing that the audience is in on the joke, and is ingenious enough to figure out how to make new twists on it.
And quietly deliver a message with some weight to it, while they’re at it. The franchise is entirely based on a gimmick, which is part of what makes it so difficult to get the tone exactly right. Bloodlines always chooses fun over trying to milk pathos out of what in the real world would be a cripplingly traumatic situation. But it includes a great scene from series regular Tony Todd, who filmed it while aware that he was dying. In past installments, he’s been there either to give exposition or to give an ominous warning about trying to cheat death. Here, his scene is more poignant and more applicable to the real world: he acknowledges that we’re all going to die, and the only answer is to enjoy the time we have left, instead of worrying about it.
This keeps the movie’s ending from being darkly comedic and nihilistic, but more a reinforcement of that idea in a way that’s perversely uplifting. It’s funny that the dad is needlessly pedantic enough to point out that our hero didn’t actually die, and therefore didn’t break the chain. But implicit in that whole scene is the fact that they were still, unwittingly, marked for death, but they’d been happy the whole time. They’d gotten over their estrangement and were just enjoying their time together.
The whole gimmick of a Final Destination movie is that we all know how it’s going to end for the characters in the movie, and it milks as much suspense as possible while we stress out over all the various ways it might happen. It was a really welcome touch to end the movie with an acknowledgement that we all know how it’s going to end for the people in the audience, as well, and why stress out about it?