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Final Destination 2
*1/2
Cinema
Reviews - Week of February 14, 2003
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 15. USA.
90 minutes. Directed by David R. Ellis. Written by Eric Bress, J. Mackye
Gruber, Jeffrey Reddick; based on characters created by Reddick. Starring
A.J. Cook, Michael Landes, Terrence Carson, Ali Larter, Tony Todd, Jonathan
Cherry, Keegan Connor Tracy, Sarah Carter, Lynda Boyd, David Paektau, James
N. Kirk, Justina Machado.
In the three years since "Final Destination",
I have caught the movie on television several times, and revised my original
opinion. It's not just good, it's pretty darn great. There is a splendid
determination to its inventive ways of killing characters off, a purity about
its prolonged lurid fascination with the build-up to elaborate death sequences.
The appeal of the movie was obvious when it came out, but on every new viewing
I grin wider, wince harder and end up in more awe than ever
before.
It began with a high school trip to France. Sitting
in his seat before takeoff, a kid named Alex had a premonition that his plane
was about to explode. He flipped out, tried to warn people, and ended up
getting himself and his buddies thrown back into the airport. And then the
plane blew up... and in the weeks after, the survivors started to die...
and they realised that fate was stalking them... and they had to figure out
a plan to cheat death.
"Final Destination" was fun in the way it threw
its characters to the meat grinder. "Final Destination 2" is
tedious because it subjects its audience to the assembly line. What is it
about sequels? If their writers took just one long day of thinking about
ways to expand the original story into a second part, they might end up being
onto something. Instead they tend to retread the methods of first movies,
and clutter the new scripts with unnecessary plot details in order to create
some difference. This makes a sequel worse, not better. If you're gonna be
lazy, why not do a straight remake and be done with it?
This sequel begins with a college girl called
Kimberly (A.J. Cook), who is driving her friends to a summer vacation. In
the middle of the freeway, she foresees an epic pile-up, then stops to try
and warn people. Her car blocks the traffic, and so when the accident happens,
the folks who were originally meant to die are not on the main road and end
up going unscathed. And then these survivors start to die... and... and....
we know the drill.
If "Final Destination 2" had some fun with its
shameless ripping off, or if it existed to top the death scenes of the first
picture, then we might have a good time here. But no. The screenplay comes
up with some nonsense about how everything is linked to the events of the
first film, and Death is tying up loose ends and has waited for coincidence
to bring all these people together and end their connections to the original
victims... or something. It also includes a police detective who buys into
the Death story, and helps the movie spend more time on boring scenes of
investigation than horrific expectation.
Kimberly's predictions are so vivid that we cannot
help but roll eyes -- the first one, for example, depends on her believing
a vision in which she sees the fates of people she can't even be sure exist.
The death scenes, on the other hand, are so brief that there's hardly any
point. The cast is a bunch of D-listers who are impossible to remember, although
we do get an appearance from the sole survivor of the first movie... which
leads me to another point. Ali Larter is a fine performer and all, but when
she's the big celebrity guest star of a movie, you know there's desperation
in the air.
COPYRIGHT©
2003 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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