Final Destination 2 (2003) New Line/Horror-Thriller RT: 90 minutes Rated R (strong violence, gruesome accidents, language, drug content, some nudity) Director: David R. Ellis Screenplay: J. Mackye Gruber and Eric Bress Music: Shirley Walker Cinematography: Gary Capo Release date: January 31, 2003 (US) Cast: Ali Larter, A.J. Cook, Michael Landes, Keegan Connor Tracy, Jonathan Cherry, T.C. Carson, David Paetkau, James Kirk, Lynda Boyd, Justina Machado, Tony Todd, Sarah Carter, Alex Rae, Shaun Sipos, Andrew Airlie, Noel Fisher, Enid-Raye Adams, Aaron Douglas. Box Office: $46.9M (US)/$90.4M (World)
Rating: ***
Final Destination 2 changes things up only slightly. It’s still essentially a Dead Teenager Movie except not all the victims are teenagers. In fact, only one of the victims is a teen. A few others have the mentality of a teen- e.g. the high-powered career woman (Tracy, Once Upon a Time) is little more than an overachieving high school senior. Either way, Final Destination 2 is a silly but fun follow-up to the 2000 horror-thriller in which a high school boy cheated Death his due by getting a few people to leave an airplane right before it exploded upon take-off. This time it’s a college girl, Megan (Cook, Criminal Minds), who has a vision of a terrible, multiple-car accident on a highway. And what a gory vision it is! People are crushed, mangled and burnt. It’s pretty cool!
Freaked out by her vision, Megan blocks the on-ramp to prevent those in the cars behind her from being killed when logs fall off a semi and cause a series of accidents that claim the lives of all involved. Among those killed when it happens for real are the three friends in Megan’s car en route to spring break in Daytona. Shortly thereafter, the survivors start dying in bizarre accident. The first guy, recent lottery winner Evan (Paetkau, Disturbing Behavior), gets impaled through the eye by a fire escape ladder after narrowly escaping a fire in his apartment caused by a random but connected series of events (i.e. a refrigerator magnet in the microwave, his arm getting caught in a sink drain, a malfunctioning fire extinguisher).
Looking for answers, Megan goes to visit Clear Rivers (Larter), the only survivor of ill-fated flight 180, now a voluntary patient at a psychiatric hospital. Initially, she refuses to help but changes her mind and takes Megan and fellow survivor Thomas (Landes, TV’s Lois & Clark) to see the creepy mortician guy (Todd) from the first movie. He tells them that only new life can defeat Death. One of the survivors (Machado, The Purge: Anarchy) is pregnant. If she has her baby safely, they will all be saved, right? Well, maybe. Don’t even ask me about the surprise revelation regarding the survivors of the highway disaster; I refuse to spoil the surprise which is actually pretty neat and, at the same time, ridiculous.
The death scenes in Final Destination 2 are gory and cool. Somebody gets crushed by a falling pane of glass (SMASH! SPLAT!). A woman is decapitated by an elevator. Another woman is impaled by a pipe through her head after her car airbag is accidentally activated. A man is sliced in pieces by a flying barbed wire fence. Two people die in an oxygen-related explosion at a hospital. A kid is blown up by a malfunctioning grill. In total, the body count is 11.
I know it’s a sequel but I like Final Destination 2. If I’m being honest, I like all the Final Destination movies to a certain degree. Let’s not pretend we watch these movies for the plot, characters, acting, writing or directing. We come to see people die in gruesome ways; the same reason gorehounds keep rewatching the Omen movies. I openly admit to being a gorehound. I want to see lots of blood. I want a high body count. I want to see the guy who mops up the stage blood at the end of each day’s shooting receive mention in the end credits. My only gripe about Final Destination 2 is that the gore is CGI. I prefer stage blood as many of you already know. CGI blood makes for something of a disconnect, don’t you think?
If I was to review Final Destination 2 by the usual standards, it would totally come up short. A lot of the acting is bad. The storyline is silly. Can you even call it a “plot”? This will become a commonality of the Final Destination movies. You get the vision followed by a group of characters stepping away from certain doom then the actual disaster. This is followed by the survivors dying off while the one who had the vision figures out how Death’s plan works and how to beat it. Sure, it’s redundant but I don’t really mind. You see, I’m not looking at Final Destination 2 (or ANY of the sequels) the same way I do most movies. It’s a geek show designed to make viewers say “Whoa, cool!” whenever a character bites the dust. It may not be great cinema, but it sure makes for a good gory horror flick.
