Final Destination 2
From AwardAnnals
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| Director(s) | David R. Ellis |
|---|---|
| Distributor | New Line Home Entertainment |
| Honors | |
| Kimberly forsees a horrible auto accident and saves herself and a few others by blocking an on-ramp. As in the first Final Destination, Death attempts to balance the books with an entertaining variety of elaborate and gruesome deaths. | |
Kimberly forsees a horrible auto accident and saves herself and a few others by blocking an on-ramp. As in the first Final Destination, Death attempts to balance the books with an entertaining variety of elaborate and gruesome deaths.
Honors
Reviews
Amazon.com
Final Destination 2 begins with a well-orchestrated multicar pileup on a freeway—a horrifying accident that turns out to be a premonition, as seen by a young woman (A.J. Cook) who saves herself and several other people by blocking a freeway on-ramp. Thus, as in the first Final Destination, a prescient vision disrupts the destined plans of death, and death goes to extreme lengths to correct matters. What makes Final Destination 2 entertaining is that the characters can only survive by learning to recognize the signs of impending doom—and the signs are basically the cinematic foreshadowing that moviemakers use to invoke suspense. This, combined with some elaborately complicated and gruesome deaths, fosters a ghoulish humor that’s more entertaining than the smirky self-referentiality of Scream. Final Destination 2 doesn’t aspire to be a great movie, but trash has its pleasures. Also featuring Ali Larter as the only survivor of the first movie. —Bret Fetzer
Barnes and Noble
Can we really cheat fate? That’s the question posed in this suspenseful sequel to the surprise horror hit of 2000. It begins vividly, just like the first Final Destination, with the leading character having a precognition of disaster. Twentysomething Kimberly Corman (played by relative screen newcomer A. J. Cook) is driving with three friends in an SUV when she suddenly has a vision of an apocalyptic traffic accident. Her quick thinking later averts a tragedy just like the one she imagined, but when the people apparently slated to die in that accident subsequently meet death in grisly ways, Kimberly becomes convinced that a malevolent fate is responsible. The first film’s only survivor, the oddly named Clear Rivers (again played by Ali Larter), returns to do battle with the unseen force of destiny she believes to be stalking her. Director David R. Ellis knows his mandate: He expends his creative energies on the death scenes, which are numerous in variety and hideously gruesome in execution; although he does so at the expense of character development or any deeper focus on potential ambiguities in the narrative that would foster psychological terror. The special effects are unusually convincing—so much so that viewers with queasy stomachs might be well advised to seek gentler entertainment. But diehard horror fans will enjoy this cinematic wallowing in blood and gore. Final Destination 2 is one of those rare sequels that delivers exactly what it promises, in quality and quantity greater than its predecessor’s. Ed Hulse
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Related works
Alex and a group of high school students take a flight to Paris for a French class trip. Alex has a premonition of the plane crashing and prevents his schoolmates from taking off. The plane bursts into flames shortly after takeoff, and Alex must deal with suspicious FBI agents as well as his freaked-out friends. Unfortunately, Alex continues to foresee the gruesome, dramatic deaths of those that should have died on the plane.
Set six years after the original Final Destination, the latest installment in the series centers around a high school senior who has a premonition of a fatal roller coaster accident involving herself and all her friends. When the premonition proves true, those who have “cheated death” and survived the accident are forced to deal with the repercussions of escaping their fate.
