Family Style: FINAL DESTINATION BLOODLINES

The Final Destination movies are dances between predictability and randomness. Of course they’re about dying. The fun conceit is that a character’s vivid premonition of a mass casualty event causes them to prevent said event. Death then stalks the survivors to claim them with random acts of mayhem. Small details accumulate through insert shots—loose screws, leaky faucets, groaning chains—until a quick pile-up of calamities leads to a sudden accidental death. The movies are structured more or less identically, but the renewable novelty of these accidents keep them fresh. Blissfully free of tortured lore or a villain morphing into a mascot, here’s a horror franchise that has a consistent quality, a modest groove, and evergreen appeal. The sixth and latest entry, somehow the first in 14 years, is Final Destination Bloodlines. From the directors of Disney Channel's live-action Kim Possible remake, it somehow disappoints by hitting the right beats while going even bigger and broader. Where the franchise started with gore as delayed morbid punchlines, it’s now fully cartoony and excessive, over-the-top at any given chance. 

Part of it is the tone, a light and casual breeziness even when dread should be kicking in. A larger part of it is the style—an overly clean digital look with bland straight-to-streaming sitcom lighting and animated effects that make everything look totally artificial. The movie’s one new wrinkle is making the victims a family. It starts with grandma as a young woman preventing a collapsing sky-view restaurant. (The sequence has a fun rhythm but a totally phony look.) Decades later, the last of those survivors are finally dead and the curse descends the family tree, whacking branch after branch on the way down. This should escalate the tension, but it somehow evokes the flimsiest emotions of the already just-south-of-comic premise. They never feel like a convincing family, and by the second or third death their behaviors make little emotional sense. There are some good gags in the sequences—a tattoo parlor up in flames has some sly twisting humor, and a thwack from a soccer ball in the background of a shot is a fun jolt. But by the time, after nearly two hours, of the movie’s final deaths—a typical blackout gag in classic Final Destination style—the specifics of the variables are too outsized and the violence not too far removed from Frogger splats. This may be an official continuation of the series, and has some of the surface-level appeal of all of its superior predecessors. But the aesthetics make it feel like a knock-off. It left me craving the real deal.