Monthly Archives: May 2025

Movie Review: Final Destination: Bloodlines

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The consensus of the overwhelming number of opinions is that the concept behind the six Final Destination movies is absurd – “death finds revenge on groups of people who cheated, violent death”.

Regardless, no one can argue about the high-quality special effects that show the horrific deaths of many people in these films. One cannot help but be impressed with the ideas and creativity behind the deaths and the chain reaction of events that cause these extremely violent scenes.

The sixth installment of the Final Destination franchise, “Final Destination: Bloodlines”, starts in a high-rise luxury restaurant tower where the overloaded top floor, where people are dancing, starts a series of events that cause the collapse of the building and the horrendous, violent death of everybody in the restaurant. This time around, the premonition that prevents tragedy is different, now recurring in the mind of the great-granddaughter of the woman who saved many lives some fifty years earlier in the high-rise tower.

The rest of this story follows the Final Destination paradigm where death finds revenge (in order) of all the people whose lives were saved, this time around killing all of the descendants of the people whose lives were saved fifty years earlier, because they were not supposed to be born – a new insane addition to the Final Destination story. It is all very stupid, but saved in each movie by the creativity and incredible special effects.

While this is a very good horror movie, the 92% Rotten Tomatoes concensus is a bit too high, with my rating 85% and a recommendation mostly for fans of the six Final Destination movies.

Movie Review: Fight or Flight

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The only obvious difference between the nonstop-seen-this-before action movie “Flight or Fight” is that all violent fights and action occur on a plane, with the additional insanity of a final fight scene that involves a chainsaw, even though there is no way a chainsaw would be allowed on a plane like this.

Fight or Flight stars Josh Hartnett as Lucas Reyes, an FBI agent on the bench, who is mostly sleeping and drunk in Thailand for two years, when he is called up to track down a criminal on a plane. About the time Reyes is about to board the flight, his team at the FBI realizes that just about everybody on the plane is a hired killer, setting the stage for nonstop fight and action scenes for the rest of the movie, without any regard to a coherent story.

The other issue with a movie like this is that with the beatings, stabbings, and shootings that Reyes takes during the many fight scenes, he would have died midway through this film. There is never any real reason to throw logic this far out the window, just to make an action movie.

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for Fight and Flight are a too high 77%, with my rating around 50% and a solid miss.

Movie Review: The Surfer

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Another one of those, “quality means nothing, story means nothing, let’s be strange, weird, never been done before”.

This time, the movie is called “The Surfer,” starring Nicolas Cage as “The Surfer”, somewhere on the coast of Australia, about to surf with his son and running into a group of lowlife local Australian surfers. Then a series of events that involve theft, bullying, and intense violence, leaving The Surfer battered, dirty, and looking like a homeless man. While watching this too-long, depressing movie, you can’t help but think. Why doesn’t he just drive away? Why does he stay in this parking lot overlooking a beach that is loaded with criminals who might kill him?

What is so strange about this film is that The Surfer spends almost this entire movie hanging out, sleeping in his car in a parking lot, on his cell phone trying to get the funding for a house he wants to buy on the coast, calling his boss, trying to save his job, in a downward spiral into homelessness and depression for this entire two hours. What is the point of all this?

Aside from all these problems, the majority of this movie makes no sense and eventually degrades into constant attempts to trick the audience, wondering what is real, what is fake, and what is just a hallucination. Is this man now really homeless, imagining all that happened before? Is all this happening because he has been in the sun too long, or is he on drugs or just drunk? One hour into this and it is impossible to care about what is going on, we just want it all to end.

I have never seen a greater difference of opinion on Rotten Tomatoes, with the critics giving this bad movie an 86% rating, and the audience 50%. What are the critics thinking here? Perhaps they are all on the same drugs that The Surfer is using in this film? This time around, the critics are once again dead wrong, with the audience correct at 50%, and a run for your life, miss this movie at all costs.