Director: David R. Ellis
Writers: J. Mackye Gruber, Eric Bress, Jeffrey Reddick
Cast: A.J. Cook, Michael Landes, Ali Larter, Keegan Connor Tracy, Jonathan Cherry, Terrence C. Carson, David Paetkau, Lynda Boyd, James Kirk, Tony Todd
Runtime: 90 mins.
2003
It is as if the powers that be heard my complaint about Final Destination--the way it waffles between tones without fully finding its feet--and decided to commit wholesale to the campy ridiculousness of the freshly franchised premise. You've seen it all before; disaster strikes, but not before our main character has borne witness to a vision that lets her prevent a select group of victims from being victimized. But Death doesn't like that very much. Death likes that so little that it will hunt you down and butcher you in ridiculous and sometimes demeaning ways.
That's not all. Our hero Kim Corman (A.J. Cook) soon realizes that her averted accident, a deadly traffic pile-up on a highway, occurred exactly one year after that crazy business with the airplane from the last movie, and she must convince her fellow survivors of the relevance of this fact. Once they've all banded together, they are just one clunky expository scene away from figuring out what exactly it is that connects them all. Let's just say that Death is fastidious, and prefers to do some spring cleaning every so often.
The format is the same as the previous film, so let's not waste too much time on structure. The characters are also at the same level of vague interest, though they fare better overall by dint of being a more diverse group than just a bunch of teenage classmates. And let's get one further order of business out of the way: any pretensions this franchise had of being scary have been tossed out the window between movies. Final Destination 2 is a horror movie in guise only.
What I'm really interested in focusing on is the way the filmmakers have taken Final Destination as a jumping off point to craft the ironic existential horror comedy that the first could have been. Screenwriters Gruber and Bress start things off with the decision to mythologize the events of the first film rather than ignore them. Typically these types of connections cripple sequels, but the premise of the first film was so ill defined that there is plenty of room for expansion and experimentation.
The most concrete way this manifests is in the decision to bring back Ali Larter as Clear Rivers. She's been Sarah Connor'd between films. What was once another helpless teenage victim is now a fly, jacket-wearing badass who has locked herself in an insane asylum as protection against Death. In some ways, she acts as the viewer surrogate. Clear lived through Final Destination, so of course she'd be the best one to ask about what will happen in the second time around. At one point, when pressed for information, she tells Kim to watch out for the signs.
"Have you ever seen anything creepy or ominous? An in-your-face irony kind of thing? . . . Recognizing those signs usually means the difference between life and death."
This goofball self-aware attitude about the premise pervades the entire film. One gag at a gas station has the characters scanning the environment for potential hazards that feel kind of forced, like a woman walking a whole bunch of dogs at once. Unfortunately, Larter's limits as an actor hinder her from going all in on crafting this mystique about herself; rather, she lets the language and costuming do this (fly jacket) as she coasts through the movie. But it only makes sense that Clear would introduce the cast to the other legacy character of the film, Bludworth (Tony Todd), the melodramatic mortician. Freed from the shackles of a movie that is even vaguely trying to take itself seriously, Todd hams it up in a showstopping cavalcade of cryptic one-liners. He cremates a corpse like nobody's business.
The setpieces are constructed like elaborate slapstick comedy gags. The first death in particular is reminiscent of that classic joke structure where someone keeps almost hurting themselves in different ways, then finally does get hurt in the dumbest way of all. Lottery winner and pile-up survivor Evan Lewis (David Paetkau) survives an increasingly unlikely series of kitchen mishaps, including a hand stuck in a garbage disposal and a fiery explosion, only to die in a silly ladder-based mishap. It's structured like a Looney Tunes bit, and it works.
The rest of the deaths work as comedy pieces to varying degrees. One airbag death is particularly nasty in its pointlessness. One of the more creative deaths combines metal claw hooks and an elevator. It's too bad the movie chooses the way it does to build to a climax. The final sequence is a lame boilerplate must-fulfill-the-prophecy-to-beat-fate sort of deal, only somewhat redeemed by the button of the last scene.
Now let's talk about the coup de grace of Final Destination 2, and I would be shocked if it weren't the high point of the entire five movie series: the highway pile-up. In traditional Final Destination fashion, the event is preceded by loads of cutesy foreshadowing, including AC/DC's "Highway to Hell," a bus of football players chanting pile-up! pile-up!, and a little boy bashing together a replica of the protagonist's car with a big truck while staring at her. These little moments are the first beats in a long sequence of audience prep for the devastation to come.
The most impressive thing about this sequence is the patience David R. Ellis demonstrates in setting it up. We spend a great deal of time on the road, getting glimpses of the other vehicles around our protagonist's, peppered with tiny character beats and disaster fake-outs. Ellis realizes that a ten car pile-up means little on its own; we need to be introduced to the highway drivers as if it were a little ecosystem. That way we understand that driver A is high, driver B is angry, driver C's passenger is banging some water bottles against the dashboard, etc. The meticulous build-up serves two purposes: 1) Building a just crash already brand of tension, and 2) Establishing the individuated elements so that the carnage comes together to tell a trackable story. And what a story it tells.
For a franchise that can be summed up as a series of violent Rube Goldberg machines perpetrated by Death, I have a hard time imagining a more exquisite sequence than this one. The attention to detail on display may have something to do with Ellis's long career as a stunt artist. Stunt teams know better than anyone the ways in which bodies and objects move through space, an invaluable knowledge base for crafting action setpieces.
Final Destination could have easily become a glum and loathsome franchise, but it took the future director of Snakes on a Plane to enliven the proceedings with a whip sharp sense of humor. Final Destination 2 has a flair that the original lacked. I can only imagine it's downhill from here.
2.5 / 5 BLOBS
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