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Member since:08.03.2001
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Some things are simply unavoidable. Pressing your tongue against the inside of your mouth to feel out the cause of a sharp pain in your gums. Your ear getting warm after speaking on the phone for too long. And – sequels. It sounds wacky but even Gladiator is being mooted for a second coming. The Hollywood rule of thumb being; if it makes a profit, make another.
Hence, you get stinkers like the woeful The Mummy Returns, or Scarface 2 – Tony Lives! But occasionally you get a nugget of goodness like Gremlins 2: The New Batch – or this second outing for the wacky adventures of fate.
***THE PLOT***
A series of characters travel along a highway, amongst them is College Girl (I don’t always remember character names – deal with it!). She seems to keep witnessing fatality-related ‘signs’ as she drives – a small boy in a passing car smiles and crashes two toy vehicles together in his hands…”Highway To Hell” plays on the radio…and there follows a violent accident, which kills around 10 individuals. The twist is – this never happened. The College Girl merely envisioned it, and manages to evade death, along with a select bunch of underwritten stragglers.
All this exactly one year after the events in ‘Final Destination’, which involved the passengers of airplane flight 180 dodging death - and then trying to stay alive by predicting the pattern in which they would have died.
Both movies then follow the same plot – can the people destined to die avoid an untimely death? Most likely not, as each one is picked off by a series of bizarre accidents. It seems death wants to tie up all the loose ends linked to the airplane crash…but do those ends want to be tied just yet?
***GORE VITAL***
I was averagely surprised that they’d
made another Final Destination movie – after all, it’s an easy franchise to continue, even without the tenuous link provided in this instalment. I’m glad they did though, as this movie gets straight down to the business of giving you exactly what you want in a horror movie – killings!
I was trying to decide how this managed to get away with a 15 certificate rating – especially after watching the bloody introduction. People have their entire torsos eviscerated by huge logs, a motorcycle crushes a man, and one poor sod is burned alive in his car before being rammed into by a HGV. It’s fantastic, over the top and makes you wonder about the deeper implications of tittering like a schoolboy who just drilled a hole through the wall in the girl’s toilets as you enjoy the demise of the folks on screen.
Thing is, that’s what this movie is. The plot is thinner than Kate Moss being put through a wrangler after 4 weeks on the Atkins Diet. In a black hole. Death is after you – run! Simple. Make with the fake blood already!
So how did this get a 15? Easy. I done gone figured it all on my lonesome. There is no killer. No drooling, mask wearing redneck with a claver standing proudly over the corpses of his victims. No one waking up with blackening crusts of blood under their fingernails and saying “I had the strangest dream”. Nope, the killer is the big cheese - death itself – and if the movies have taught me anything, it’s reiterated at the end of the review.
***DODGY OLD DODGERS***
The movie presents some rather thinly sketched dramatis personae to provide fodder for Mr Reaper. There’s a fair few feisty females – always nice to see women taking the lead (wink wink) – but they fall into the stereotypes of Angry Pregnant Woman, Innocent College Girl, The Wacky One, Go-Getter and Concerned Mother. The male leads are hardly challenging either – Supportive Policeman/Potential Lover, Cocky Loner, Druggie Loner, Disbelieving Loner, Kid.
Now, Final Destination didn’t exactly inspire me to give a rat’s bum about the lead characters – but they were interesting enough to follow around, as they mugged in disbelief at the surreal deaths all around them. The lead character in this movie has very little involvement in the attempted heroics. FD has the wacky Alex going mental and obsessing over the ‘death list’ that he theorised.
The heroine here just kind of ambles around, and I never really felt convinced that she was that bothered about saving anyone. Her actions mainly consist of her gasping before having a premonition, then running towards people going “look out” and such.
Perhaps the only character to be sympathetic is, oddly, the Druggie. He’s the comic foil a few times, and whilst he may not be the most ‘worthy’ of character types, he at least has a scene which is funny and touching, when the inevitability comes down on him and he asks the heroine to clear out all his drug and porn paraphernalia from his home, so his mother won’t find out. “It’d break her heart” he mutters. The rest of the doomed-ers just run around squawking and with the possible exception of the Concerned Mother, I was just waiting to see how they bit the big one.
***OH, OKAY THEN***
I wasn’t going to mention too much about the set-pieces, as they are the main reason for sitting through the movie. You are in for a treat when Cocky Loner – who happens to be a recent lottery winner – seemingly escapes his fate. Airbags are not a life saver. Ponytails easily get caught in things.
Hey – I just noticed something. This movie seems to have a bit of a thing for penetration. At least 2 deaths are caused by long objects piercing people. There is also a lot of fiery death – including the incredibly uncomfortable few seconds in the intro when a man is trapped in his car. Not to mention the near-pornographic detail as one player is burned in a fire towards the end of the movie – we see their face blister and crack in the flames before an explosion throws their charred corpse towards the camera. Ick!
I must also say once more that the movie Cube has the best ever slicing-into-bits-with-sharp-wires sequence in it, and all other movies – this one included – who try to emulate it are kidding themselves. That said, the unfortunate joe who gets diced by a flying fence in FD2 comes pretty close to being as impressive, as his guts slop all over the shop…my mind turned to one thing - sausages!
***INEVITABLY…***
Let’s face it, kiddo, there is simply nothing else like the Final Destination franchise – and it could run and run. The story behind the further deaths required by – um, death – are handled with a reasonable explanation which could see the “ripple” affecting who knows how many people linked to the Flight 180 disaster. The score may be punctuated with cruddy modern rock but you can’t have everything.
The direction is smart and has some neat flourishes linking scenes together – the camera at one point drifts onto a computer screen, which displays a map that scrolls downwards. This then dissolves into a character driving down a road, the branches of trees reflecting in her windscreen, which kinda merges into the map lines from the previous shot. Cool.
If only the direction stayed that imaginative t the end of the movie, where a diabolically cheesy and pointless flashback ruins any pathos. Are audiences really so stoopid that they need a flashback to events alluded to MINUTES AGO to explain the actions of a character? I say no. The director says otherwise. Rubbish. The premonition scenes are also a bit clunky, but I’m not quite sure how you’d express such a thing in a non-silly way. So I’ll shut my big yap.
One more thing – CGI. I am the first person to bemoan its use in movies, especially in horror. But dang, they use it extremely well here – physical effects would not be able to capture the realistic decapitations or fantastically overblown deaths portrayed herein. Kudos to the compu-boffins!
***END***
I would say that the high gore quotient might prove a bit too much for the delicate amongst you. Myself, I thought this was a sick little gem. It’s the kind of movie that future generations of horror moviemakers will look at and draw inspiration from. Hopefully. Well, it’s better that than them thinking Thirteen Ghosts is the way forwards.
For every beginning there is an end...Final Destination 2, the sequel to the hit 2000 ... more
supernatural thriller, finds Clear Rivers (Ali Larter) the only survivor of the crash of Flight 180. Locked away by her own choice in the perceived safety of a psychi...
![Final Destination 2 [DVD] [2003]](http://picnicb.ciao.com/uk/78513809.jpg "Final Destination 2 [DVD] [2003]")
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