Final Destination Bloodlines (2025)

 

Final Destination Bloodlines (2025)

 

5/10

Starring

Kaitlyn Santa Juana

Teo Briones

Richard Harmon

Owen Patrick Joyner

 

 

Directed by Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein

 

 

I can say from the start, the acting didn’t amaze me. The cast all felt very B-movie-like and didn’t seem strong enough to carry the film. Steph, played by Kaitlyn Santa Juana, was the only actor who seemed to have a little bit of the A factor. Also, the first death, that of Iris, I didn’t get the shock I expected, and I felt the casting overall wasn’t the best they could’ve done. Steph looked Hispanic, and her brother looked more like a mix of their parents (Asian and White), so the casting there was off.

So, from the start, I wasn’t feeling the movie. The whole thing with Iris locking herself up, always being one step ahead of death, and trying to pass a message to Steph didn’t give me the eww horror factor I think the director and writer were hoping for. All these bad vibes could be because I’m so used to the franchise and didn’t get to feel what I was supposed to feel.

The movie picks up after the second death. The moment you think the third death is coming, that’s when it finally got my attention. I sat up like, here we go, this is the Final Destination creativity I wanted to see.

So, what’s the plot about? Well, if you know Final Destination, it’s the same idea—someone foiled death’s plan, and now death is circling back to clean the slate of everyone who escaped.

The one who foiled death’s plan is a woman named Iris, who later got married and had kids—just like the hundreds of people she saved that day. But then one day, Iris, now a mother, finds out death is circling back, and after the death of her husband, who was supposed to have died in the original event. She goes a bit psycho, and this cause her family to be taken away from her. Years later, Iris has been tracking the people she saved and has a book detailing how death has picked off all of them—and every family member that was not meant to be born, if the person in question had died in the original event.

Iris’s granddaughter Steph has been struggling with a persistent dream about what happened to Iris. So, she goes to find her. When she does, Iris scares her off with her behaviour, but wanting to prove death is after her, Iris leaves her safe haven and dies immediately. Then her firstborn dies in a gruesome way. Steph finally reads the book, pieces everything together, and writes down the order in which her family members are going to die. So here we are, watching how death is going to go about finishing the job.

The movie has an annoying start, but it picks up the moment death catches up with the third person, and from there it takes a nice turn.

Now, the ending was good. It caught me off guard. I thought everything was settled, but the writer and director didn’t want us walking away without something to think about.

Will I call this a good movie? Well, no. Sadly, even though I got through it, I can’t honestly tell anyone to go see it. It’s not fun.

Thunderbolts (2025)

 

Thunderbolts (2025)

6/10

Starring

Florence Pugh

Sebastian Stan

Wyatt Russell

Olga Kurylenko

 

Directed by Jake Schreier

 

The talent in this movie alone, acting-wise, is outstanding, and it would be a waste of a review if I spent too much time delving into how each actor held their own. It would overcrowd the other factors in this movie, so take my word for it, the acting here is amazing, and Florence Pugh was just a character to love, be amazed by, and long to see on screen often.

The movie did use enough effects to deliver its story, but as a friend said, I couldn't shake off the feeling that I was watching another Guardians of the Galaxy (2014).

I think what I liked most about the movie’s story is the feeling that each character wants something more than their present situation — and that, in a way, resonated with me. The characters in this movie, other than Yelena (Pugh), that are key to the story are de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), a CIA director facing the threat of losing her job and doing everything she can to make sure that doesn’t happen. We have Red Guardian, Bucky/Winter Soldier, Ava (Ghost from Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)), Bob (Sentry/The Void), and Wyatt (the guy meant to be the new Captain America before losing it to Falcon in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier series).

De Fontaine has been using the others (except Bucky) to do covert operations to keep her name in the clear. When she’s done, she decides to do the smart thing and just kill all the operatives she’s been using by sending them on a final mission, which neither knew at the time was against one another. It’s there we get this alliance of operatives who survive the setup.

Now they are on a new directive, to stop de Fontaine (kind of revenge) when Bob gets captured, and somehow, he joins side with de Fontaine. The group now joined by Bucky and Red Guardian, are going to try and save Bob, who we discover is someone de Fontaine has experimented on and is a very strong superhuman, which can take down even the avengers on his own.

I didn’t like the clumsy slow start, the overhanging effort to paint de Fontaine as evil, and the very annoying, disjointed links that bring everyone together to form this group. It’s chaotic and just way too convenient — something that could’ve been avoided with better writing. The movie, though, begs intrigue. The moment Bob, Ava, Yelena, and Wyatt escape getting killed by de Fontaine, there’s a strong intrigue that captures your attention, and you wonder how they’ll link up with Winter Soldier. You can already predict (which is also not a good thing, but a result of bad writing) how Red Guardian will join the group, so the wait wasn’t bad.

In the end, the movie was fun. I felt the excitement when Bucky joined the group, and for me, the movie may not be the best I’ve seen, but it’s a warm welcome to something that opens the door to better Marvel movies. I believe this movie is better grounded than Captain America: Brave New World (2025), and the jokes are actually funny here and not out-of-the-way annoying or out of place. Will I watch this movie again? I believe so. And I think if you like superhero movies, or once did, you’ll like this one too.

A Minecraft Movie (2025)

A Minecraft Movie (2025)

2/10

Starring

Jack Black

Jason Momoa

Danielle Brooks

Emma Myers

Sebastian Hansen

 

Directed by Jared Hess

 

I would like to get out of the way and say, the CGI in this movie is actually very good and you will like the effects used. Also, the voice acting in this movie was just masterful, the voice casting director did a good job here, but for me, that was just about it. I did not like the dialogue, and the movie itself felt like a wounded horse trying to take one step and just wobbles before crashing.

Everything just does not play out the way I would have expected it to, I was bored to the bone watching this movie. I saw the Rotten Tomatoes rating of 47%, and the audience gave it 86%, and I felt the reviewers didn’t know what they were saying. But after seeing the movie myself, I have to agree with them on this one, this is a horrible movie.

When a movie has flat dialogues, a quest that starts with one of the oddest things, and a young boy who never seems to get the idea of letting go of things, but instead lets those things drag him into another world or knock him off his flight path, you start to wonder: was this movie written in such a way that the writers had an idea of how they wanted things to end and just wrote around it, making everything convenient without reason?

If you think too much, this movie falls apart and if you refuse to think at all, you will fall asleep. That’s how bad and boring this movie is. The actors, to me, did not fit their roles — except for Jack Black, who has carved the looney character persona to a fit. Everyone else tried to make it work, which you can give them their due, except Sebastian Hansen, who plays Henry – My God, what kind of performance was that?

So what was this movie about?

Washed-up doorknob salesman Steve (Jack Black) chases a childhood dream by sneaking into a mine, where he stumbles on the Orb of Dominance and the Earth Cube. When he combines them, a portal opens, and he finds himself in the Overworld, a place where everything’s made of cube-shaped blocks you can mess with to create new things. Steve creates his own paradise, and he’s happy, but then he finds another portal, which leads to the Nether — a fiery nightmare ruled by Malgosha, a gold-obsessed piglin queen who hates creativity. She wants Steve's Orb to dominate the Overworld, so Steve sends his dog Dennis to hide the Orb and Cube under his bed back in the real world.

Meanwhile, in the real world, we meet Garrison (Jason Momoa), a former ‘80s video game champ now running a dusty game store, and Henry, a kid who just moved to town with his sister. Henry’s goofing around with Garrison at the store when he spots the Orb and Cube, which Garrison got when he bought Steve’s possessions at a storage auction. Henry puts the Orb and Cube together, and it leads him to the same mine Steve was in when he got into the Overworld. So, because he reused to let go of the thing pulling him, he gets sucked into the Overworld, along with Garrison, his sister, and a real estate agent who trailed them to the mine. Now they’re all stuck in this blocky world, scrambling to find a way back home.

This movie is already a success at the box office, so I would not be surprised if there’s another part in the works. But one thing I am surprised by is that someone likes this movie. I would stay far from it if I were you — it is too childish and silly to actually be worth your time.

 

Novocaine (2025)

Novocaine (2025)

 

6/10

Starring

Jack Quaid

Amber Midthunder

Ray Nicholson

Betty Gabriel

 

 

Directed by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen

 

What I like about the movie is the way it captures your attention from the start. The story pulls you in and keeps you interested in how this relationship on screen will go. And having seen only the movie posters (not the trailer), you’re left wondering when the action will start.

I have to say, the main attraction in this movie is the character dynamics and acting between the two leads, Jack Quaid and Amber Midthunder. They made me love the movie and had me smiling every time I saw the way they interacted.

This movie has a nice story, that fails to land perfectly, you can tell from which point the writers lost inspiration, and the movie just went off the tracks. The plot is about a man named Nathan Caine (Quaid), a well-behaved, keep-to-himself type with congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis (CIPA). This condition has made it hard for him to experience things most people take for granted, especially when it comes to women. At his workplace, there’s a girl he likes, and she likes him too, and her name is Sherry (Midthunder). She convinces him to hang out, and they connect, and there was a brief something brewing between them.

Then there’s a bank robbery at their workplace, and Sherry gets kidnapped, and it was at this point some of the movie’s flaws start to show. Some predictable elements creep in, along with very cliché moments we’ve seen before—like when someone who shouldn’t be in an action situation ends up right in the middle of it and behaves in an unrealistic way. But the movie is an action comedy, so it tries to laugh these things off. Nathan feels it's his job to go after the kidnappers and save Sherry, and when a man who can’t feel pain goes after people, some interesting stuff is bound to happen.

That said, I didn’t like the comedy during the fight scenes, I get it, he can’t feel pain, but he can still die, so there should be some sense of danger, not just banter while getting hit.

Even though I mentioned the movie has predictable elements, there’s a flip in character intent that I did not see coming at all. We learn there’s more to the bank robbery than we thought, and that twist had me glued to the screen—I was more hooked than ever.

Like I said earlier, the final act, went completely off the rails, the movie just went too violent for no reason—too much shooting, too much rage, and way too many broken bones. That kind of brought the movie’s appeal down a notch.

Would I recommend you see this movie, yes, I would. In the end, it was still a nice movie to see.