Final Destination: Bloodlines Finds Life in Death

Final Destination: Bloodlines

★ ★ ★ ½

Final Destination: Bloodlines has no business being as good as it is. It’s the 6th in a series of films that started in 2000 and rarely rose past mediocrity. They were still moderately entertaining, campy horror where characters do their damnedest to defy Death. In these films, Death is an unseen force that starts each movie attempting to take out a large group of people in some form of major disaster. It could be a plane crash, massive car accident, rollercoaster disaster and so forth.

Someone always has a premonition about the impending doom and is able to prevent anyone who will take the warning seriously from Death’s clutches. The rest of these movies entail Death catching up with them and killing them in elaborate, accidental, violently bloody mishaps.

Kaitlyn Santa Juana as Stefani
© 2025 Warner Bros. Pictures

Bloodlines starts us off in the 1960s where Iris (Brec Bassinger) and her soon-to-be fiancee Paul (Max Lloyd-Jones) are attending the grand opening of the fictional Skyview Restaurant, inspired by real-world landmarks like the Space Needle and Skylon Tower. The tower was completed five months ahead of schedule. Iris wisely asks if that’s a good thing.

It’s not a good thing, because Iris and everyone at the top of this restaurant are going to die. The glass dance floors, which are the only barrier between guests and a 400 ft drop, will crack and shatter. The structures holding the tower deck together will collapse. There are an untold number of spectacularly bloody, gruesome deaths where everything that could go wrong will as one tragic event after another leads to the tower’s complete collapse.

Deadly Chaos at The Skyview Restaurant
© 2025 Warner Bros. Pictures

The tragic events in these films are often triggered by the smallest of things. In this case, a shiny penny. By the time the film is over, you’ll groan at the phrase: “Find a penny, pick it up.”

We’re then thrust into the present day where Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) wakes up screaming from a nightmare in a college lecture hall. The nightmare was of the Skyview collapse. She’s been suffering from this same nightmare recently, and it’s affecting her schoolwork, so much so she’s on academic probation. This puts her scholarship in serious jeopardy.

She returns home and discovers she’s related to Iris and uncovers a family curse. Iris had foreseen the Skyview tragedy and saved everyone from certain death. Since then, Death has been systematically eliminating the people who were supposed to die that day. And since the offspring of those people wouldn’t be alive had they died in the first place, they are also snuffed out.

One of many funterals in Bloodlines
© 2025 Warner Bros. Pictures

Bloodlines gives us a more elaborate plot than the previous films, easily standing alone as the best in the series. It’s rare when a sequel this far down the line bests any of its predecessors.

There is much depth to the story as Stefani navigates a strained family dynamic, uncovering a family history Iris’ adult children want to keep hidden. The family tension is immediately baked into the story, and it serves the dramatic narrative very well.

Stefani is a refreshing three-dimensional character. Despite her desperation to get to the bottom of Iris’ premonition and the clues given, Stefani cares for her family and genuinely wants to keep as many of them alive as possible. The character is well written, and Juana’s performance keeps us watching.

It does seem that the characters get over the deaths of their loved ones rather quickly, which keeps the story moving at a good pace, but leaves us to wonder, “Do these people even care?” Characters are given just enough time to recognize the horrible, bloody demise before they must continue on with the mystery and try to survive to the next horrifying tragedy.

The premise of this franchise is absurd, as we’re all on some sort of collision course with death and the attempt to influence when our proverbial time will come, short of diet, exercise and smart choices, is a lesson in futility. We have no say in the matter, and that’s probably why cheating death is such a high-value concept. Bloodlines offers us the most entertaining and compelling in the franchise.

These films may be absurd, but they tap into something primal – our desire to believe that with enough foresight, we might dodge the inevitable. Absurd as it is, Bloodlines gives us something too few horror films offer – a sympathetic character.

A word to the wise, though. If you see a penny at the top of the Space Needle, best to just pretend it’s not there.