NEW YORK (OSV News) – The Grim Reaper will have his revenge on those who try to cheat him of his haul. Such is the dubious message of the franchise whose sixth installment, “Final Destination Bloodlines” (Warner Bros.), maintains the series’ high splatter factor while throwing in some “moral” posturing that only makes the film more repellant.
The sight of characters being impaled, flattened, crushed and/or shredded loses all shock value early on in the dismal proceedings. All that’s left thereafter is the narrative’s cynical disregard for human life in general.
“Final Destination” movies trade in premonitions of death and vain efforts to evade an unwelcome fate. Here the forebodings – in this case, oddly, retrospective – haunt and torment college student Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana). Her recurring nightmare concerns a decades-old tragedy involving a Space Needle-like restaurant called the Skyview.
This dream so incapacitates Stefani that she has to drop out of school and head for home. There she learns that Iris (Brec Bassinger) – the young woman at the center of the building’s spectacular fall – is, in fact, the youthful version of her grandmother (Gabrielle Rose), who now lives in a bunker-like cabin deep in the mountains.
Paranoid Iris lays out the plot. She tells Stefani that the latter’s vision of the long-ago event was not what actually occurred. Instead, Iris sensed that the Skyview would collapse. So everyone there took the down elevator to safety.
Predictably, however, destiny was not to be so easily defrauded. In due time, the hand of death claimed all the potential victims of the Skyview disaster. Iris shows Stefani newspaper clippings detailing all the violent calamities that ensued. And Iris, of course, is next on the list.
After her gruesome departure, co-directors Adam Stein and Zach Lipovsky keep their disassembly line in steady motion. The script, penned by Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor, emphasizes complicated set-ups and exotic forms of demise that usually entail squishing or crunching noises as the doomed are mangled.
The added twist for this chapter is Stefani’s eventual discovery that death also moves among relatives – in birth order, no less. This leaves various members of her family scrambling to clarify their sometimes doubtful parentage.
Those still bothering to pay attention will note a scene in which two potentially ill-fated boys find themselves in a hospital. They’ve been told that killing someone else will extend their lifespans. So they consider two possible targets, a newborn baby and an old woman.
The brevity of this incident does nothing to lessen its vileness. Indeed, the “Final Destination” toward which the moviemakers seem to be aiming is an all-time Hollywood low.
The film contains pervasive gory violence, a trivializing of the value of human life, including that of an infant, a couple of profanities and frequent rough and crude language. The OSV News classification is O – morally offensive. The Motion Picture Association rating is R – restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.