Rating: 3/5
Stefani has the same nightmare every time she sleeps, even when she dozes off in class. It features her grandmother, Iris, as a young woman in a Needle-adjacent restaurant called Sky View, watching everyone die in horrible and convoluted ways before dying herself. She decides she needs to go home and track down her estranged grandmother to get some answers. She may not like what she learns, because it involves the death of everyone in her family. Will she be able to save them?
Like all the Final Destination movies, the deaths are wild Rube Goldberg machines that are fun to see play out until the visceral CGI gore fest of the death itself. I’m definitely getting softer in my years, because this movie grossed me out in an unfun way. I didn’t want to see anyone die—what the hell was I thinking going to this?
I would say that this is a better movie than Freaks, which was also directed by the same people. However, it still suffers from trope-heavy family dynamics that shorthand relationships instead of developing them.
Still, I had fun seeing this in the theater, especially with my friend Owen laughing at the ridiculousness of the situation. I’m glad I saw it, so I don’t have to deal with anyone saying, “Oh, it’s the best Final Destination—you gotta see it!” It’s the exact same as the others, gang, just hyper-meta with all its references to the spectacle deaths from other movies in the series.