The Final Destination franchise includes six films, ten novels, a one-shot comic, and a comic series. There is no typical slasher to be seen in these inventive horror films. Instead, the serial killer is Death himself; and one of the great pleasures of a Final Destination film is watching to see just how ridiculous the deaths will be. Each death tries to soar as far over the top of credibility as possible and it works. Fearing for these people’s lives is one-part thrilling, one-part disgusting, and one-part hilarious.
Buy Final Destination 2 Blu-rayA tiny bit of background on the first film is all that is needed to jump right into the sequel. In the first Final Destination movie, a group of students are boarding a plane for their class trip to Paris. One student has a premonition that the flight will end with the airplane blown to bits shortly after takeoff. A fight breaks out among the passengers and several are left behind in the terminal. The plane proceeds to actually explode over the city.
This sequence of events irritates Death himself, who apparently likes to plan gruesome deaths well in advance and doesn’t like his plans altered. The survivors begin to be killed, one-by-one, in the order they would have been killed during the airplane disaster. Death will get his revenge.
In Final Destination 2, a year has passed from the events of the first film, and a group of college students are heading to Daytona Beach for spring break. In the car are Kimberly (A. J. Cook), Shaina (Sarah Carter), Frankie (Shaun Sipas), and Dano (Alex Rae). On an on-ramp to the freeway, Kimberly has a premonition that there will be a multi-car crash with many casualties. She stops her car and gets out in the middle of the road, preventing eight people from entering the highway and subsequently saving all their lives when the crash instantly occurs in the real world. Death is not pleased again, and more carnage is to follow. In fact, mere seconds pass before Death begins to get his revenge turning Shaina, Frankie, and Dano into a mist of blood on the highway.
The joy of a Final Destination movie is watching the inventive ways in which each victim gets their final moments. Death has a sense of humor, it seems, for each death sequence must be as complicated as possible and end in the most grotesque way for maximum blood. Kimberly begins to have more premonitions of the upcoming deaths of those who survived on the highway. She seeks out the one survivor from the first film, Clear Rivers (Ali Larter), and learns that only a new life can defeat death. Since one of the survivors is currently pregnant, Kimberlee believes it is her job to protect the woman until the baby can be born and the curse lifted. It is a horror/splatter movie – Kimberly is not very successful with her tactics.
Not for the faint of heart, Final Destination 2 is a splatter-fest with a great dose of humor. The fact that the killer is Death himself is the twist that makes these films engrossing. Everybody knows you can’t beat Death, and Final Destination 2 is a grim, fun reminder of that fact.
Special Features:
- Filmmaker Commentary – Director David Ellis, Producer Craig Perry, and Screenwriters J. Mackye Gruber and Eric Bress
- Deleted / Alternate Scenes with Commentary
- The Terror Gauge – Featurette
- Cheating Death: Beyond and Back – Featurette
- Bits & Pieces: Bringing Death to Life – Featurette
- Theatrical Trailer
