Which ‘Final Destination' Is the Best? All 6 Installments (Including 'Bloodlines') Ranked From Worst to Best

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After a 14-year hiatus, the Final Destination franchise returns to cinemas with the franchise's sixth installment, Bloodlines. Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein's update-cum-soft-reboot has scored franchise-best critical notices, with our review noting it's 'exactly what fans are after' and a perfect entry point for newcomers while also providing ample fan service.
One of the most consistent franchises ever produced (there's no outright bad installment in the Final Destination series, just some less-than-stellar ones), the films roundly follow a teenager who has a psychic vision of a terrible, mass-casualty event before saving most of the people whom Death is about to claim. But, unfortunately for them, Death likes to have his way and sets out balancing the scales by knocking them off in excessively grisly accidents, most of which involve formerly benign household implements like beer bottles and cuticle scissors.
With Final Destination: Bloodlines now in cinemas, we've ranked each movie in the Final Destination series from worst to best. Do you agree with our picks?At a merry high school graduation party held at an amusement park, Wendy Christensen (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) envisions a deadly rollercoaster crash. After saving her friends, Death begins picking them off one by one.
Part one director James Wong returned to helm this second sequel, but it proves only that Wong misunderstands the series he helped create. There's an odd line of leeriness which runs through this one, which dooms the female characters to the most gruesome fates and casts all the male figures as hollering, pumped-up bullies of different stripes. There's fun stuff here, like a grisly nail gun gag, but it's the closest the series has come to being an outright drag.
Whilst enjoying the reverie of youth at a NASCAR event in this fourth installment, Nick (Bobby Campo) envisions a grisly crash in which the stands are wiped out. After saving his friends, Death begins picking them off one by one.
Incredibly cheap-looking but undeniably fun in a no-frills exploitation kind of way, The Final Destination sees part two director David R. Ellis return for another round of carnage — this time in 3D! The addition of another dimension (several months before the release of Avatar, no less) gives this sequel a bit of a jolt, though the amateurish acting and achingly overlit color palette (to counterbalance the darkening effect of 3D, one assumes) give the whole enterprise the feeling of a cheap Syfy channel rip-off.While on a corporate retreat, Sam (Nicholas D'Agosto) envisions a horrific bus crash which claims the lives of himself and his co-workers. After saving his friends, Death…well, you get it.
The second installment to receive the 3D treatment, Final Destination 5 is a particularly clever sequel that proved the franchise still had legs. Directed by James Cameron protégé Steven Quale, the film is notable for two reasons: It introduces the oft-derided twist that its characters can cheat Death's plan by killing another person, therefore adopting the time they have left; and it ends on a terrific twist which, at long last, ties the franchise together. It's too good to spoil here.
Embarking on a class trip to Paris, Alex Browning (Devon Sawa) envisions a disaster which claims the lives of everyone on their flight. After the survivors begin dying in bizarre ways, Alex and fellow survivor Clear Rivers (Ali Larter) set out to unravel the mystery behind Death's plan.
Final Destination is a very good post-Scream teen chiller, but it's just an above-average Final Destination movie. After you've seen the sequels and have an awareness of the franchise's general concept, it feels as though this first installment takes altogether too much time to get to the point. Despite clever set piece design and some very fine acting, Final Destination feels like an outline of itself. There are just brief flashes of the Rube Goldbergian antics that would arrive in sequels; only one sequence achieves the silly yet visceral terror that the franchise would soon own.Plagued by disturbing visions featuring her grandmother as a young woman, Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) returns to her estranged family to figure out why Death has his sights set on them.
An exceptionally well-tuned sequel. As fun as the Final Destination series has always been, few would argue that they were genuinely good movies with proper arcs and character development. Quite surprisingly, Bloodlines reverses course and delivers a Final Destination movie which is unabashedly gruesome, terrifically silly and overwrought, but admirably heartfelt and well-produced. A great deal of thought went into this sequel, and it shows.
On her way to a spring break getaway, Kimberly Corman (A.J. Cook) envisions a gruesome highway pileup. She teams with a cop (Michael Landes) and original survivor Clear Rivers to put a stop to Death's plan.
Unequivocally the most fun and most disgusting of the Final Destination flicks, stuntman-turned-director David R. Ellis's cracking sequel kicks off with one of the best car crash sequences ever put to film and gains speed from there. There is a gleefully politically incorrect, Italianate video-nasty quality to Final Destination 2, which makes rewatching it even two decades later feel taboo and slightly indecent. That's a huge compliment, by the way.