It’s been exactly one year since a horrible plane crash that killed – among others – a high school group set for an overseas learning experience. Left behind was a handful of students who were lucky enough to be pulled off the jet prior to takeoff – only to drop one by one over subsequent days in a series of remarkable accidents. Those were the events of Final Destination, an entertaining 2000 thriller with a darkly funny edge. And now, Final Destination 2 covers similar territory, beginning on the air crash anniversary, when a gruesome highway pile-up kills 18 people, but leaves untouched a new handful of survivors. These people were meant to die in the crash, but are saved by a premonition of Kimberley Corman (A.J. Cook), who sees the disaster coming so refuses to let a group of motorists enter the highway. But as we learned in the original movie, death has a plan, and it’s not going to let someone with a vision mess it up.
There’s only one significant holdover from the cast of the first-movie – Ali Larter returns as Clear Rivers. She’s now living in a mental hospital – voluntarily – in order to protect herself from the doom that she’s convinced must be just around the corner. But when history starts repeating itself with the highway disaster, Kimberley pays Clear a visit and lures her out of her padded cell to help interrupt death’s plan and save some lives. It turns out that every one of the highway conflagration’s ‘lucky’ survivors has a connection to the ‘survivors’ of the previous year’s Flight 180 (all of whom, except for Clear, didn’t end up surviving for very long ). The two are joined in their death-prevention effort by a state trooper (Michael Landes) who was another of those saved on the highway. Together, the three seek out a way to break the pattern of death and save themselves from a seemingly inevitable gory end.
While this might sound like a recipe for nothing but tension and horror, there’s also some funny dialogue scattered throughout this movie, naturally almost all of the black humour variety. While people ruminating on their imminent death might not seem like the makings of fun, the script’s wit is consistent, its many false alarms keep us on the edge of our seats, and the gory moments – and they are extremely gory – punctuate the proceedings like clockwork. The original didn’t show a whole lot of blood, but this time, we’re treated to a deluge of gore and body parts.
Director David Ellis, noted in the movie world mainly for his long list of appearances as a stuntman, has taken what’s an admittedly predictable cinematic exercise and pulled it off capably. With this sort of formula, success depends almost entirely on finding imaginative ways of killing people, and then adding as much fun as possible along the way. Ellis and company can claim modest success in both departments, aided by some nice red herrings in the script and propelled by a good pace.
Once you get past the fact that this is essentially the same story played out onscreen for a second time, the measure of Final Destination 2 comes down to how you answer a single question – can you buy the idea of 100 minutes devoted to just how creatively people can be sliced, diced, broiled, crushed or dismembered? If you can, then you’re going to like this sequel. This is a surprisingly enjoyable movie, a gory sequel that’s fast-paced, witty, reasonably smart and decently entertaining.
The measure of it comes down to whether you can buy the idea of 100 minutes devoted to just how creatively people can be sliced, diced, broiled, crushed or dismembered.- Brian Webster
Perhaps you can’t cheat death in Final Destination 2, but apparently you can kill originality.- Terri Clark
