One of the fun things about Final Destination: Bloodlines is that its heroine essentially knows she’s in a Final Destination movie. The protagonists in these films have historically cottoned on to the fact that Death is after them and others who sidestepped a deadly tragedy, and then attempted to break the cycle, but Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) is so in tune with fate’s design that she can walk down a suburban street and recognize that, say, a soccer ball and a leaf blower are a potentially lethal combination, and how that might come to pass. This adds a bit of a meta level to the proceedings, and thus it’s not surprising to note Guy Busick, who worked on the last two Screams, as one of the screenwriters.
One of the nice things about Final Destination: Bloodlines is that it’s likely to be a popular success and thus do a lot for the careers of directors Adam Stein and Zach Lipovsky. It’s their first feature since the terrific, underappreciated Freaks came out in 2019, and Bloodlines proves them to be just the right people to reinvigorate a franchise that has been dormant for 14 years. It doesn’t reinvent the property, exactly, but it does bring vigor, rooting interest, and some surprise to what may be the most necessarily formula-bound of modern horror-film series.
