FINAL DESTINATION 2

Release Date: January 31, 2003
Studio: New Line Cinema
Director: David Ellis
Screenwriter: Eric Bress, J. Mackye Gruber
Starring: A.J. Cook, Andrew Downing, Michael Landes, Ali Larter, Tony Todd, Enid-Raye Adams, Lynda Boyd, Terrence "T.C." Carson, Jonathan Cherry, James N. Kirk, David Paetkau, Keegan Connor Tracy
Genre: Supernatural, Thriller
MPAA Rating: R (for strong violent/gruesome accidents, language, drug content and some nudity)
Official Website: DeathisComing.com

Plot Summary: Driving with a group of friends to Daytona Beach, Kimberly (Cook) has a sudden premonition that saves them all from a catastrophic freeway pileup … or so it seems. Ali Larter returns from the first film as Clear Rivers, the lone survivor of the Flight 180 airplane crash, whom Kimberly goes to see once death starts coming after her friends. It’s a rollercoaster ride of fear and fate as Kimberly races to save her friends and herself from the implacable jaws of death.

Reviewed by Peter Veugelaers © 2003
- Don't be deceived -- get out of cinema quick!

The future looks bleak for young friends in Final Destination 2, the sequel about a particular young adult with natural ability to look into horrific incidents that are about to happen. These premonitions – intuitive insights of usually foreboding events, in this case accidents - have a more sinister face.

Kimberley Corman (Cook) is on a trip with her friends when she has flashes of an impending accident on the highway. Although the Final Destination franchise paints a sombre picture of life it doesn’t take itself too seriously when Kimberley, while cruising her four-wheel drive, flicks the radio switch on to hear AC/DC’s "Highway to Hell" as she anticipates the following doom, a touch of humour that takes the intensity out of the moment for the audience. After the heavily orchestrated opening sequence where vehicles collide and explode, Kimberley emerges the only survivor to cheat death and come to terms with her psychic aberrations that could save life if channelled the appropriate way.

This is overtly graphic, interspersed with quieter scenes of characters exploring the realms of possibility to defeating death and creating life. A few scenes touches on the reluctance a character has in realising that death is a forgone reality and so Final Destination looks to deal with the issue of life and death in broad and semi-serious terms. In this way it reveals a basic tendency for people to avoid and deny human finiteness and mortality. By allegorising the death-rebirth-death cycle of life, with morbid and conversely lighter tones, it offers light philosophical comfort in coping with the facts of life. It also rejects a conventional understanding of evil by eliminating at the beginning the reality of the devil.