Some light spoilers, but it doesn’t really matter when the point of the movie is seeing convoluted deaths rather than an actual plot or characterization, it doesn’t really matter that much.

Sure, I had an idea about what the gimmick is, so I wasn’t going in completely blind, but while I tried to find a boxset of Final Destination movies at some point out of interest, I could never find a decent one, so I have never seen the actual movies.

For a moment, this was a problem, but not for long. The thing is that this movie, and I presume the previous ones as well, have their own cinematic language. We keep seeing various things that might potentially be dangerous and at first it is distracting, but then I understood that they are the point. We are just waiting to see how these things will contribute to the death or deaths.

Sure, there is a story, of sorts, but the point of the story is to be a framework onto which those deaths can be added. In many other movies this kind of an approach can be a problem and cause movies to feel templated, but I didn’t mind it here. It might be that I hadn’t seen any of the previous five movies before (or six, I’m not sure), so I haven’t gotten bored with this approach yet, but if they always put this much effort into the deaths, I am still interested in finding them.

So, the story is that our main character (whose name I can’t remember) figures out that the recurring nightmare she is having is about her grandmother, whom she had never even met. She sets out to find her grandmother and does so only to find out that the grandma had build a fortress for herself to protect her from Death, who is apparently out to get her, because she ruined Death’s plans regarding an accident, because she had a premonition that everyone at a restaurant was going to die.

Death has been fixing this problem ever since, killing the people and their descendants, in the same order they were meant to die initially. As Iris, the grandmother, had been marked as the second to last to die, she figured all this out, because almost everyone else there that night had already died a convoluted death.

So, now our hero knows who is going to die next and she knows there’s five people between Iris, who sacrifices herself to make sure everyone understands what’s going on, and herself. So, of course, we get to see how they die (except that there’s a twist or two on the way).

Another thing that was clearly part of the series is Tony Todd. He died last year, so if there’s ever going to be more of these movies (and based on the performance of this one, I assume there will be), but based on his IMDb page, he was in four of the previous movies, three of which was playing the same character as in this one, apparently.

Death, as an entity, does not appear, but the rules around him seem very arbitrary. Apparently, you can live longer by killing someone else, but that seems stupid. That would mean that serial killers live forever. Also, why does Death feel the need to work in this specific way? People die in mundane and uninteresting ways every day by the hundreds of thousands (around 172000 on average to be more precise), so how does Death have the time set these deaths up? The number above, 172000, is almost exactly 2 per second, which means that if this is indeed a conscious being, it has about half a second on average to kill someone. So, if he uses a few minutes on the people we see in the movie, that means that it must then pick up the pace for a while.

But none of this really matters. We are there just to see the deaths. I didn’t check, but it seems like the first death scene is about half an hour. Again, convoluted. But also bloody.

They do work. The movie is pretty fun. I definitely don’t need to see these kinds of movies very often, but with that in mind, it is still pretty good. I bet they had fun in the writers’ meetings. There’s only three credited writers, but one would assume at least the directors and some of the producers would have been part of this process and the writers just came up with the details after they came with ideas as a group. Of course, this is just speculation on my part, but ocnsidering the fice (or six) previous movies, the stakes need to be higher and the deaths even more convoluted for this movie to exist.

Am I recommending it? Yes, but with caveats. You need to be ready for the gruesome deaths and the distinct editing, which can initially feel weird, but it is a fun movie with surprisingly fun characters and enough characterization to make the movie feel more than just a vehicle for bloodletting.