Final Destination premiered in 2000 with a novel idea.  A high school student foresees his death in a plane crash and so just before take-off, he freaks out and is removed from the aircraft along with his friends.  Lo and behold, the plane explodes into a fireball seconds after take-off. The kids are incredibly lucky but since the afterlife doesn’t like it when you “cheat the system”, Death comes after them one-by-one in a grizzly manner.  It may not have been the best inflight movie choice, but it spawned four sequels released between 2003 and 2011.

The characters continue to be killed in alarming fashion but the only thing that won’t die is the franchise itself.       After a 14-year hiatus, the creatives are back with Final Destination: Bloodlines.  I enjoyed the original but future instalments have disappointed by rehashing the same idea.  It’s reminiscent of the Saw franchise.  Instead of developing characters and creating interesting new plot points, it’s devolved into a series where the main talking points are the gruesome deaths.  Warped shock value will have it fans, particularly those into the horror genre, but it’s not enough for me.

There’s an early glimmer of hope that Final Destination: Bloodlines might be sufficiently different.  We start in the year 1968 when a young woman saves dozens of people at a rooftop restaurant when she accurately predicts a deadly disaster will take place.  The restaurant is evacuated and closed without a single fatality.  We then slip ahead to the current day and, yeah, Death has come knocking again but because of a particular event (which I won’t spoil), it’s also after the children of the survivors.  The narrative is centred on the Campbell family and their efforts to avoid Death’s grasp.

Try as it might, Final Destination: Bloodlines ultimately succumbs to its history and feels like a “same old, same old” cash grab taking next-to-no chances.  The characters aren’t worth caring about and their actions lack logic.  The writers concoct a series of increasingly bizarre deaths and, as if to pad the film’s running time, drag them out as long as possible with obvious visual clues in the lead-up.  The final half hour is contrived and there’s nothing to suggest you’ll remember much about the movie, except a few nasty beheadings, in the weeks to follow.

The 2020s have been a strong decade for the horror genre with releases including Talk to Me, Titane, The Substance, and Barbarian.  I wish studios spent more time finding these rich, original scripts instead of clinging to tired franchises which have been milked for all their worth.