Final Destination 2 (2003)

If you thought Final Destination was a mess of conflicting themes and ideas that eventually boiled down to a mash of nonsense, well, you probably wouldn't watch Final Destination 2, and that'd be the end of it. Helmed this time by David R Ellis, a man better known for his stunt work than his directing, Final Destination 2 is more of the same -- in every aspect but the fear.

The survivors of the original flight are now all dead, with the notable exception of Clear (Ali Larter), who's booked herself into the penthouse suite at the local looney bin -- a padded room where nothing in the slightest bit dangerous can reach her. Death still isn't any good at his job, though, because right before an enormous pile-up on a highway, teenager Kimberly (A. J. Cook) has a vision of the disaster and manages to save some people from their grisly demises. She's not good enough to actually save any of her friends, though -- which is fortunate, because one of her friends is the most hideously ugly boy ever committed to celluloid -- and instead is forced to team up with the other survivors.

Confession time: one of those survivors -- the greasy, stupid, druggy one -- is played by Jonathan Cherry, and that's actually the whole reason I watched either of these movies. I wish I hadn't, though; Mr Cherry needs a new agent, or some talent, stat.

Perhaps predictably, Kim breaks Clear out of the mental asylum and they go back to see the creepy morgue guy, who spins them some rubbish about how to cheat death, they need to balance the scales by creating new life. Yeah, balance the scales by creating life. It flies in the face of all logic, because that actually imbalances the scales further, so what you'd really need to do in order to convince Death to skip you would be to kill someone else, but that's another, much darker movie, so let's pretend their way makes sense. After all, we're already dealing with a movie that relies on the premise that a biological function has not only purpose but also intent and malevolence, and that life is merely a long game of not dying, so it's not as if any more nonsense is out of their way or anything.

It probably isn't a good idea to even try to follow the ideas here, because -- well, okay, somehow, by surviving, thanks to a mysterious vision and a combination of signs that may as well have been huge flashing neon signs reading 'You're Going To Die In 5 Minutes,' people confuse Death and throw the entire universe out of whack. Death, much like Santa, has a list, only instead of being divided into two 'naughty' and 'nice' columns, his is divided into categories like 'razor wire' and 'aviation fuel' or 'big stonking pole through the face.' It's also apparently sub-divided into many smaller lists, because otherwise there'd be some crazy backlog of cancer patients and starving children who can't die till some idiot explodes a barbecue in his face. Which makes no sense, and I think I can smell my brain frying.

Basically, Final Destination 2 is pretty much a straight continuation of the first movie, only somehow far less coherent. Watch at your own peril.

IMDB link

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