Final Destination 2 (2003)
Cast: Ali Larter, A.J. Cook, Michael Landes, Tony Todd, Terrence Carson
Director: David R. Ellis
Synopsis: not so much a sequel as a re-run...great creative deaths but that's it!
Reviewed by: Omar Khan

 

The first Final Destination arrived during the post-Scream/I Know What You Did Last Summer wave of horror movies and was hailed by horror fans as a novel and refreshing idea—a welcome change from the psycho-slasher teen fare that had already begun to parody itself into premature oblivion. The original film revolved around a group of teenagers who "cheat" Death by getting off a plane they were destined to travel on after one of them experiences a terrifying premonition. In the film's unforgettable opening sequence, the audience watches in horror as the enormous 747 explodes, lighting up the night sky like a giant firecracker, while the handful of youngsters who unexpectedly disembarked survive, having apparently cheated Death's design. It may not have been a work of genius, but it was certainly an imaginative and macabre twist on a genre that was crying out for fresh ideas.

The film became something of a sleeper hit and has now spawned a sequel which, truth be told, is more of a re-run with a handful of new and increasingly improbable plot twists thrown into the mix. Once again the emphasis falls squarely on devising an assortment of spectacularly gruesome "death by accident" sequences—the very hallmark of the original film. Things begin most promisingly with another horrifying premonition, this time culminating in a colossal motorway pile-up. A small group of people, mostly young adults, survive the catastrophe, thereby once again "denying Death's design" and provoking the Grim Reaper into concocting ever more elaborate and fiendishly inventive ways of reclaiming what is supposedly his.

One by one the survivors fall victim to increasingly intricate "accidents", each dispatched according to "Death's list", while the young woman plagued by the recurring premonitions seeks out the guidance of Ali Larter, the survivor from the original film, who has since voluntarily incarcerated herself in a psychiatric institution, convinced that hiding inside a loony bin might buy her a little more time before Death eventually catches up with her.

As the body count mounts and the increasingly elaborate death scenes pile one upon another, the scriptwriters find themselves forced to wrap all these spectacular set-pieces within something vaguely resembling a coherent plot. This is precisely where the film comes spectacularly undone. In their determination to explain the bizarre events unfolding on screen, the writers disappear completely over the edge. Whatever fragile plausibility the premise possessed in the original is now buried beneath a hopeless tangle of ludicrous speeches about "Death's list", mystical "signs", and increasingly preposterous theories suggesting that the only way to outwit Death is somehow to disrupt the order in which people are destined to die. The story lurches from the merely unlikely into the utterly absurd and, by the time our damsel in distress is attempting to confuse Death by deliberately plunging her car into a lake, most audiences will probably have stopped caring altogether.

The film's saving grace lies almost entirely in its wonderfully staged death sequences. The unfortunate fellow whose hand becomes trapped in the garbage disposal, the lad enduring an absent-minded dentist's drill, and above all the magnificently orchestrated motorway catastrophe are all superbly designed pieces of cinematic sadism guaranteed to have viewers squirming in anticipatory agony. There are enough ingenious and grisly set-pieces to satisfy even hardened gore hounds, but the thread attempting to bind them together into a convincing narrative is virtually non-existent.

The direction is slick, the pacing brisk and the action handled with considerable confidence, yet none of this can overcome the fatal weaknesses of the screenplay. The moment the film starts trying to explain the mechanics behind Death's grand design is the very moment it derails completely. Sometimes the greatest strength of an idea lies in its mystery. Once you begin explaining the inexplicable, you merely invite the audience to laugh at what they had previously been willing to fear.