Cody Hamman has Film Appreciation for the 2003 sequel Final Destination 2.
2000's Final Destination was a highly entertaining horror movie that introduced a concept that a lot of viewers were anxious to see more of - the idea that Death has a design, and that if people somehow cheat Death when it's their time to die, this force that lurks around us at all times will make sure the people who were meant to die will still meet their fate. Death accomplishes this goal by subtly manipulating elements around the characters until something around them that didn't seem to be anything to worry about ends up taking them out, like they're stuck in a complicated mousetrap designed by Rube Goldberg.
Three years after the first film's release, New Line Cinema released Final Destination 2, giving us another chance to see Death knock people off one-by-one... and this sequel is so much fun that it's actually a lot of fans' favorite entry in the franchise.
Written by J. Mackye Gruber and Eric Bress, who also share story credit with Jeffrey Reddick (who wrote the original treatment and script for the first movie), the story of this follow-up begins on the one year anniversary of the plane explosion that kicked off the horrific events of its predecessor. We're introduced to lead character Kimberly Corman (A.J. Cook) as she's about to head off on a road trip from New York to Florida with three of her friends - and we have to immediately start questioning how sensible this Kimberly character is, because her friends are some of the most obnoxiously dumb and inappropriate people you could ever dread getting stuck with. Thankfully, they don't survive the opening action sequence.
Final Destination 2 was directed by veteran stuntman David R. Ellis, and his stunt background was greatly beneficial to the film, which we find out when Kimberly has a premonition as she's about to drive onto the highway. This premonition shows her that she is going to die in a fiery, multiple vehicle pileup if she gets on that highway. The accident starts when a large, poorly secured log falls off a trailer being pulled by a semi truck and smashes through the windshield of a car being driven by police officer Thomas Burke (Michael Landes). Burke is pulverized, and the vehicles that were following close behind him crash, flip, and explode over the course of a spectacular stunt and effect sequence. All of the Final Destination movies have started with some kind of accident, and this pileup is the most impressive of the bunch. Viewers have been extra wary of logging trucks ever since this movie came out.
When Kimberly snaps out of the premonition, she blocks the on ramp with her vehicle so the people she envisioned crashing and dying in the pileup won't be able to get onto the highway. She saves the lives of several people, but she doesn't manage to save the lives of her friends, thankfully, so we don't have to spend any more time with them. The placement of Kimberly's vehicle in the road has always been slightly confusing to me, it seems to end up in a very different position when Kimberly uses it to block the road than it's in when a semi truck goes plowing through it at the end of this sequence, even though nobody moved it... But at least it takes Kimberly's friends out of the film.
In addition to Burke, the people Kimberly kept from getting on the highway are recent lottery winner Evan Lewis (David Paetkau); Lynda Boyd and James Kirk as Nora Carpenter and her teenage son Tim; business woman Kat Jennings (Keegan Connor Tracy); cocaine-sniffing goofball Rory Peters (Jonathan Cherry); T.C. Carson as Eugene Dix, a teacher who proves to be very skeptical when the idea of Death stalking this bunch is brought up to him; and a pregnant woman named Isabella Hudson (Justina Machado). As you can see from the Corman and Carpenter names, Final Destination 2 followed the example of the first movie and included a couple homages to genre filmmakers, but it was much less dedicated to that idea than the first movie was.
Thanks to a special TV news report, Kimberly is already aware of what happened with Flight 180 and its survivors one year ago, so the idea of Death coming after people is already in her head even before she has her own premonition. As soon as she and her fellow survivors have left the highway, she's already concerned that the same thing that happened to the people who got off Flight 180 is going to happen to them. And it does. They start dying one-by-one in bizarre accidents. The fact that Kimberly is already aware of the concept before anything even happens helps the story move along quickly, while the characters being strangers to each other makes the situation slightly different than the one in the original, where the characters already knew each other from school. These people have to get to know each other while accepting that Death is after them and trying to figure out how to cheat Death.
They get some people with Death experience to help them in their endeavor. Tony Todd reprises the role of mortician Bludworth to deliver some exposition in a creepy cameo - and his cameo is a bit too creepy for my liking. I don't think Bludworth should be quite as off-putting as this movie makes him. There's also still one remaining Flight 180 survivor for them to get information from: Ali Larter returns as Clear Rivers, who has gotten herself locked in a padded room in a mental institution because it's the safest place she could think of. Her love interest Alex Browning, the person who had the Flight 180 premonition, died between films in a rather disappointing way; a newspaper clipping informs us that he was hit by a falling brick. I don't really care that Alex didn't come back in this movie, he served his purpose in the previous one and Clear returning is a better choice as far as I'm concerned, but at least they could have given him a cooler death.
Clear is the best character in the movie. Several of the new ones come off as kind of weak, mainly because the script for this movie is a step down from the screenplay James Wong, Glen Morgan, and Reddick crafted for part 1, but some of them are fun to watch. Nora and Tim are likeable, as is Kat, and Rory is my favorite of them all, because Cherry gave an entertaining, endearing performance. But the characters are really just here to get taken out in jaw-dropping, crowd-pleasing ways, and that's exactly what happens to them. The deaths in Final Destination 2 are even better than the ones in the first film, with characters getting smashed, cut to pieces, impaled, blown up... To lift a description from Scream 2, this movie is "carnage candy". There's a sequence set in a dentist's office that's likely to get a lot of viewers squirming, but my favorite moments take place in a farm field.
Since the filmmakers didn't just want this sequel to be a straightforward replay of the first film, there are some twists to how Death goes about its business. Characters don't die in the order they died in Kimberly's premonition, as expected. They die in reverse order. We find out that this is because Death is still tying up loose ends from that Flight 180 disaster. These new characters are people who were meant to die a year earlier, but when Alex and company got off Flight 180 it caused a ripple effect that also prevented their deaths from happening. Each of them has a story that is somehow related to the deaths of characters in the first movie. For example, Kat was supposed to die from a gas leak at a Pennsylvania bed and breakfast, but she didn't make it to the place because the bus she was on hit Terry Chaney. That's a clever set-up for a sequel. Here we also find out that Death is such a stickler for following its design that it won't even let characters die out of the intended order. Eugene takes Burke's gun in one scene and tries to use it to go out on his own terms, but the gun won't fire when it's pointed at him because someone else in the group is meant to die before him. So Death was able to stop the bullets from being fired.
Bludworth tells the characters and viewers that one potential way to cheat Death for good is to introduce new life into the scenario. This is an idea held over from a deleted scene from Final Destination; that movie was originally supposed to end with Clear giving birth to Alex's child, and since new life had been added to the mix Death wouldn't be coming for her anymore. Kimberly latches on to the idea that if Isabella is kept alive long enough to give birth, that could be the new life that will stop Death.
I may nitpick some elements of Final Destination 2, but overall I think it's an awesome sequel. I have loved it ever since going to see it on opening weekend with my mom and my nephew, and have continued to love it every time I've watched it since. It proved that turning Final Destination into a franchise was a great idea, and thankfully led to more Final Destination sequels being made.
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