Parents' Guide to Final Destination: Bloodlines

This reboot of the horror series that originally started in 2000 seems to lack an understanding of what made those movies work (if "work" they did). It's bigger and longer, and it focuses on more lovable characters, but it adds up to little. This series last checked in in 2011 with full-circle closure in Final Destination 5; Final Destination: Bloodlines revives the franchise but doesn't offer anything new. The appeal of the Final Destination movies lies in the anonymous, unexplained, cosmic threat of "death," which can come in many possible ways; just when you think you can predict what's going to happen, something goes sideways, often leading to shocked laughter, along with horror at the sudden randomness of it.

This approach worked OK for the series' original, lower- to mid-budget movies about groups of friends, but now we have a more expensive movie, shot for IMAX, that's at least 10 minutes longer than any of the other films. And then we have the loving family, characters who are actually horrifyingly well-written: They feel genuine and like they really have a bond, so when they're grotesquely killed, it hurts just a little bit more. It's jarring, and then there's a distinct lack of grieving in the film: Deaths seem to mean little to nothing. All of that said, as long as viewers aren't thinking too hard about things, co-directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein do provide some clever, startling death scenes (especially one involving a highly magnetized MRI machine), though they're somewhat undercut by a reliance on cheap-looking digital gore effects. Perhaps Final Destination: Bloodlines is a resurrection that should have been left where it was, in the morgue.