While on
her way to Daytona Beach for a vacation with friends, Kimberly
Corman (A.J. Cook, Out
Cold) finds herself in the midst of a hellish multi-car
pileup. Logs streaming off a truck decapitate a police officer,
a mother and sun are incinerated in a monstrous fireball and a
motorcyclist is sliced in half by his own sliding vehicle. With
her friends dying in excruciating pain behind her, Kim spies a
semi careening towards them ready to send her to Death’s
doorstep. The grim reaper has definitely decided her time has
come.
Or has he?
Suddenly, Kim wakes up to find she’s sitting at the head of the
line on an interstate onramp. She’s been daydreaming and her
friends laughingly implore her to get on the road. But Kimberly
is sure this was more than a dream, positive this was a vision
of carnage to come. Parking her car directly in front of the
entrance to the interstate, the scared woman refuses to allow
the cars behind her – all vehicles she saw destroyed in her
vision – onto the freeway. Stepping out of the car to speak with
young state patrolman John Burke (Michael Landes, Hart’s
War), they’re both horrified as the events Kim witnessed
in her hallucination suddenly come to pass on the road sparing
the lives of the precious few she’s safely blocked behind her
SUV.
But it
isn’t over. The survivors start dying one by one in graphically
gruesome fashion almost as if Death is stalking them all. To Kim
this all seems eerily similar to events that happened just one
year before as a group of high school students who had survived
a ghastly plane crash due to a premonition by a fellow scholar
were killed one by one in bizarre and grisly accidents. Soon the
scared young woman tracks down the last remaining survivor of
that event, Clear Rivers (Ali Larter), incarcerated in a local
mental institution. With her and Officer Burke’s help, can Kim
find a way to cheat Death and save the lives of everyone
involved, or are they destined to macabre demises to satisfy the
grim reaper’s lust for closure?
Final
Destination 2
is about the most disgustingly perverse horror show I can
possible imagine. Having sat through the works of esteemed
Italian gore masters Lucio Fulci (Zombie, The Beyond)
and Dario Argento (Suspiria, Tenebre) I’ve always
been pretty sure that I couldn’t be too shocked by blood a guts
at the movies. Wow, was I wrong. Pushing the limits of an R
rating, this sequel to 2000’s surprise hit starts with the blood
dripping madly and then amps it up to levels as to now unseen in
American horror.
So what?
While the movie is somewhat fun in a sadistically enchanting
fashion – I couldn’t help but be curious how the next ghastly
execution was going to be staged – the film is still every bit
as awful as its predecessor. Each of Death’s killings is like
Rube Goldberg gone mad, relying upon so many random acts in such
perfect succession that they just become annoying. You’d think
Death would have more to do than plan such lavish finishes for
people, relying more upon the odd random falling brick than
orchestrating things so perfectly that barbed wire can be
catapulted through the in order to sever someone into thirds.
And even
if it is all staged meticulously and shot with loving flair,
this is still a film where inherently stupid people get killed
solely for the cruel enjoyment of the audience. There isn’t any
tension at all and the characters are all so one dimensional
that their deaths don’t register. Towards the end I was hoping
no one would survive, I didn’t have anything vested in their
living anyhow, so as to make their appearance in any obligatory
sequels moot. Besides, why not be the first horror film to kill
off all its characters thus letting the bad guy – Death –
win?
Of the
actors, only Larter and Cook register. Returning from the
original, Larter invests Rivers with a healthy dose of
humanistic pessimism. She’s been through all of this before and
isn’t going to make any excuses if the survivors are too stupid
to take her advice. Too bad the script lets her down. Rivers is
a tough, smart cookie but there is a moment where she does
something so idiotic and out of character it is completely
insulting. (And they must have one heck of a colorist in these
mental institutions for the formerly raven-haired Rivers is
distinctly blonde this time around.)
Cook
doesn’t have quite the role to play as Larter does, but she
still does the most she can with it. Kim is a fragile soul who
grows stronger with each morbid passing, and Cook makes that
evolution almost touching. She’s much better than the film
deserves and was I given to caring if anyone survived or not I
suppose it would have been her I rooted for.
I should
also note that the opening car crash is dynamic and
utterly terrifying. A brilliant menagerie of sound and fury,
this opening motif startles in ways the rest of the film only
hints at. This is edge of your seat moviemaking at its best,
making the utter awfulness of what came after just that much
harder to bear.
