They say life comes with only two certainties: Death and taxes. But who knew that Death comes with its own version of the IRS?
Well, if you’re familiar with the Final Destination series, you know that Death has a pretty stringent collections policy. You might cheat Death once. But if you skip an appointment with the Grim Reaper, he’ll track you down and make you pay, with interest.
And if you manage to have a family in your time evading Death? It’ll come for your kids and grandkids, too.
Back in the early 1960s, Iris Campbell and her beloved beau managed to score the hottest ticket in town: opening night at the Skyview, a Space Needle-like restaurant on top of a nearly 500-foot tower. The Skyview should’ve come down that night, along with all the hundreds of people in it. But thanks to a timely premonition, Iris stopped the disaster before it began.
Death wasn’t happy about it. Not happy at all.
Death has spent the last few decades tracking down these survivors, dispatching them one by one. And forget natural causes. No, Death wants people to expire in ways both grotesque and ludicrous, if possible: Sure, dying by stroke will pay the piper. But dying by the stroke of a Renaissance-era sword that flies through a museum hallway because a pipe in the ceiling above bursts at exactly the right time? Oh, Death finds that ever more satisfying.
Iris is onto Death’s sneaky little plans. Oh, yes. For the last few decades, she’s locked herself in a fortress (the property of which seems curiously loaded with death traps) and avoided the Grim Reaper’s icy clutches. She’s written a book filled with her premonitions on all the ways that she, and others, might die. And she’s managed to stay alive all this time.
But she’s dying of cancer now: Death always wins in the end. And when her granddaughter, Stefani, knocks on her foreboding gate and tells Iris that she’s been dreaming of the Skyview—vivid dreams that reflect Iris’ own prophetic visions—Iris knows that Death will be coming for her progeny soon enough.
But will Stefani believe this seemingly insane story? That Death is methodically picking off survivors of the Skyview in the order that they should’ve died? Iris knows it sounds far-fetched. So she steps outside her oh so safe house and tells Stefani that “seeing is believing.”
And her face is almost immediately harpooned by a weather-vane pole jettisoned by a faulty fire extinguisher. And just like that, Death clears an overdue name off its books.
Final Destination Bloodlines does try to offer a nice little message, such as it is: Enjoy life, and love the people who share it with you. Because you never know when a flying hubcap might cut off your head.
“Life is precious,” says someone familiar with Death’s nasty little ways. “Enjoy every single second.”
And that’s nice, I guess. But the poignancy of the message is undermined by … well, everything we’ve yet to talk about.
The only way a movie like Final Destination Bloodlines works is if there’s a supernatural force at play: Something that should’ve happened didn’t. And so fate, or the universe, or Death itself seeks to rectify it. “We were never supposed to exist,” Stefanie tells people—implying some intelligent (but apparently malignant) force in the universe.
And that malignancy grows more pronounced when someone tells Stefani how one can escape Death’s intentions: One can either kill someone else (and take their lifespan, apparently), or die and be resuscitated. If successful in the latter strategy, it’s apparently like pulling a domino out of one of those falling domino constructs: It interrupts the string and saves not only the person who “dies,” but all the people slated for death afterward.
But if the effort to die and return is unsuccessful, we’re told that “things can get messy,” which implies that Death is vengeful, too.
We do see a couple of Christian funerals.
Young Iris from the 1960s is pregnant, though she’s not told her boyfriend, Paul, yet. When she does—shortly after he proposes—he’s thrilled with the prospect of raising a family.
A character finds out that his father was not his biological father: The character’s mother had an affair. Julia, one of Stefanie’s cousins, wears tops that expose some skin.
The main “attraction” of Final Destination films is in not who dies, but how creatively they die. We see a lot of people perish here, and in this section we’ll tell you how some of them shove off their mortal coil. So be warned: Here be spoilers.
The opening flashback to the 1960s features the movie’s vast majority of on-screen fatalities (even though the flashback itself is merely a look at what should have been). We see dozens of people fall through broken windows or floors, and bodies often hit supportive struts as they tumble down. (The heads and body parts can leave bloody marks.) Many die on an elevator. Others are killed when a stairway collapses. Still others die by fire. (We see one woman run through the room as her dress is engulfed in flames.) Bloody hands grip a glass floor before they lose their grip, and the person falls to his death. Another victim’s face is impaled by a spike after plummeting hundreds of feet. A grand piano kills two people in separate piano-related mishaps.
In the present, a character steps on a piece of glass, setting off a chain reaction that ultimately launches a lawn mower that lands on the guy’s face. (No one ever claimed that Final Destination films were particularly realistic.) A hospital MRI scanner also mysteriously turns on, and the machine’s powerful magnetism draws in a man (covered in piercings) and a wheelchair (which follows behind). The man is ultimately skewered by the wheelchair’s metal scaffolding and folded—the wrong way—into the medical device’s opening. A third victim is compacted by a garbage truck. (Her would-be savior tries to pull the person out, but she comes away with only a severed arm.) Another victim has his skull and brain impaled by a giant spring (which screws its way inward). Several people are crushed and splattered by poles or logs.
An unfortunate fellow has his nose ring painfully caught in a chain, somehow, which slowly pulls him toward a ceiling fan. When Iris is ka-chinged by the weather vane (as detailed in the introduction), Stefanie is splattered with blood and gore. Someone suffers severe burns from an explosion. People get pricked by thorns. A man with a peanut allergy suffers an anaphylactic reaction after eating part of a peanut butter cup.
Someone gives himself a tattoo. A guy hits another man in the groin. People are pushed and jostled out of the way in a scene. A character nearly drowns. Another accidentally catches his hand in a folding knife. Someone plays an incredibly violent videogame. A tongue is pierced, and the camera zooms in close to capture the minor operation.
We hear (or, in at least one case, read) about 20 f-words and 15 s-words. We also are exposed to “a–,” “b–ch,” “b–tard” and “h—.” God’s name is misused about a dozen times, thrice with the word “d–n.” An obscene gesture is used.
People drink wine and champagne in the Skyview restaurant. When Iris and her beau, Paul, see a tray full of champagne glasses, she quips, “That’s my favorite kind!” (She’s pregnant, but the risks of drinking while with child were not as well documented in the 1960s.)
People drink beer. Someone smokes. The owner of a tattoo parlor warns an employee to not “drink any of my liquor.”
Iris deals with nausea while pregnant. She doesn’t vomit, but she runs toward a restroom fearful that she might.
A kid throws pennies off the Skyview. When a security guard tells him to stop it, telling him that he could kill someone, the kid apologizes—then calls the guard a bad name under his breath and throws a penny off the balcony, anyway.
If Final Destination Bloodlines offers a moral, it’d be this: Never, ever try to save anyone. Because, really, what’s the point?
“I saved a lot of lives that night,” Iris tells her granddaughter of that fateful night at the Skyview. “Lives that shouldn’t be saved.”
The Final Destination series is perhaps the cinema world’s ultimate expression of fatalism, a state of mind that many a teen (and many an adult, too) can fall into. Why bother? A fatalist might say. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. We’re all gonna die anyway. (And Fatal Destination chimes in with, horribly.)
Bloodlines doesn’t lean into its fatalism, of course. Its characters still try to save each other. We still root for them to be saved. But in the end, most of our characters become mere bloody spatters, their onscreen lives meant to serve as just grotesque punchlines for the film’s Rube Goldberg-like termination sequences.
Nothing matters, the film says. Which is, perhaps, a fitting epitaph to Bloodlines itself. Just as it sees its characters less as people and more as bags of gleefully squished blood bags, the film itself is vapid—a waste of cinematic space. It cackles at it kills and asks its audience to laugh along. Which, of course, the audience will do. It implores us to “enjoy life,” as its characters sometimes state.
But for me, enjoying life certainly would be the antithesis of going to this movie. It’s so much preferable to laugh and love your own family than watching another family be systematically destroyed, piece by literal piece.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
