So this most recent Final Destination turns out to be the best one out of all of them. Why? Three things:

  1. It innovates with the structure a bit, giving us a familiar Final Destination disaster opening… but then cutting to a completely different group of people, apparently decades later. What’s going on here? Well, it’ll come together, but it takes a minute, setting up an interesting mystery before it gets to the compulsories.

  2. Its premise is built around familial descent, so all the characters start out already having relationships with each other, rather than being a group of randos who are all like “why should we work together?”

  3. They lay out the rules upfront, basically plausibly in-universe, and nobody fucks around trying to do stuff that obviously can’t work (e.g., “break the chain”), and instead they try to do the things that plausibly did work in previous movies. This means there’s real tension, and actually meaningful actions.

And then beyond all that, it’s just well done. The characters are solid (for a movie in this franchise), the acting is solid (again, for this franchise). Maybe most importantly, the Rube Goldberg death setups are surprising-but-fair — everything is foreshadowed properly, but it all ends up coming together just a little bit differently than you might imagine.

I don’t want to overhype this movie — I gave it 3.5 stars out of five on Letterboxd, which is my “better than mediocre” grade — but for this franchise, this is great stuff.