I don’t care, so I’m just going to say it: DECAPITATING EVERYONE does not a sequel make.

Final Destination, the first movie, was admittedly eerie. Through a series of small mishaps, survivors who got off flight 180 right before it exploded out of the sky began to drop off like flies, except if the flies are people and those people die in really horrible and nasty ways, which include being set on fire and then having a set of steak knives dropped onto your chest, then having something fall on top of those so you are extra impaled. Yeah.

But it didn’t overdo it, not even then. Even if the end product seemed to be a bit of a stretch, it appeared plausible that one event would lead to another in Death’s design, causing the freakish, seemingly accidental deaths of all the survivors of the ill-fated flight.

Now we come to Final Destination 2, the sequel, and I have to say, SOME SPOILERS. Why? Because I still don’t care.

This is a serious Disney straight to video missing link of a crappy film.

Don’t get me wrong here: the special effects were great. Yeah! Woohoo! Congratulations, they didn’t use ketchup for blood. But seriously folks, great special effects do not a good story make. And it’s not like they had a small budget to work with here either. I’ve seen movies filmed entirely in ONE ROOM for two hours turn out BETTER than this dreams about being late at night when no one else is looking. This can’t even be half believable.

This movie shows what type of funky bad can happen when a sequel gets pushed too quickly, and way too much effort is spent in the effects department with not enough energy exerted in the writing department (or what happens when freaky Ed the No HEAD guy gets hired to write the screenplay...)

So a girl named Kimberly (A.J. Cook) envisions a giant and lethal car pile up and saves a bunch of people from dying by blocking the highway off ramp so nobody can drive. She is then saved herself by Officer Burke (Michael Landes.) The car wreck survivors are the typical rag tag group of people who all seem to fit in one cliché stereotype or another, and they’re all trying to fight death (for the most part.) Kimberly finds the only survivor still alive from flight 180, Clear Rivers (Ali Larter), to help her, even though Clear has only managed to stay alive by living in a padded room at a mental institution.

Half way through the movie we find out that the people Kimberly saved are all somehow (and in most cases, quite THINLY) connected to the survivors of flight 180 from the first film. Apparently Death’s plan made a ripple in time… AND THEN A TALKING BRAIN TRIED TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD! No, no wait, that’s not it… but as lame as this was, it could have been, and if it had, it would have been BETTER.

In Final Destination 2, these people aren’t just killed in seemingly freakish accidents where one thing leads to another and pretty soon they’re losing their heads (sorry for that awful pun), but Death might as well have adorned a black cloak and shown up as a playing character in the film. He’s closing ventilators, ripping holes fish tank tubes, dragging respirators around… Death is the invisible man, playing fatal pranks on these people and then laughing about it. In the first one, death stayed on the sidelines for the most part and just let the people walk into the situations and later find themselves dead… no one was ever really sure if death existed or not until the end. In this film, Death is getting a paycheck… he might as well have walked up, introduced himself, pulled out a giant scythe and shook their hands before slicing their heads off, then sang a little diddy, did a little dance and exited stage right.

The tie-in from this film to the last one is so WEAK it's laughable. More trying too hard comes in here as well. It just comes off reminding me why we have words like "dingleberry" in the English language (Come on, go to dictionary.com, it's there.)

The dialogue between the characters was trite and cheesy and several other adjectives along that line that own too many syllables for this movie to understand. I’ve seen better scripts in films that weren’t released in theaters (as this one should NOT have been.) It was just plain awful. Boo. Mix that with people who are trying really hard to make the best of what they’ve been given, and we have all the melodrama and emotion of a made for TV movie about victimized women ala Lifetime Network.

And just how many times can we see realistic decapitations before we all get bored? The general viewing public isn’t even raising an eyebrow now if someone in a Final Destination movie gets his head cut off in a strange and unusual way. The following is a conversation actually had by many people who watch this film:

“Hey, I have to run to the john, tell me what happened when I get back!”
“Okay”
dum de duh dum (so that’s just holding muzak, it may or may not happen within this actual conversation…)
“I’m ba-aaack! What’d I miss huh huh HUH?”
(quietly) “Oh nothing, we lost another one.”
“WHAT? Speak up, I can’t hear you…”
“I said WE LOST ANOTHER ONE!”
(giddy with excitement) “How this time? Was he de-pantsed and then eaten by a shark? Did a freak piano falling out of the sky in the middle of the desert flatten him like a crepe? Did giant space aliens suck his brains out of his ears through a pink twisty straw?”
“No, he was decapitated…”
“ Did you say decapitated? Oh maaaan! Again? This is more boring than televised golf…”

And there ya have it. This film featured too many decapitations and if there was no removal of the head, then just chunks of it were taken out. Somebody has a freaky past issue thing they need to talk to their psychologist about seriously… and up the dosage…

The very last minute of the film clenched the fact that this movie sucked and a decent ending to put closure on such a high level of suckage was just nowhere to be found… something bad happens, it’s overly gory, and people scream and there's a closeup on the main character's shocked faces. Cue loud rock/pop song. Roll credits. Har de Har HAR.

In the end, I feel sorry for people who paid good money to see this in the theater. I am hoping said people at least got a sweet piece later on that date to replace the thrill they will sadly NEVER get from the "experience" that is this movie.

Wait for it to come out on cable, then keep it on your flashback button for the boring times when a show you really like to watch has to go to a commercial break. Or, perhaps rent it if you get a two for one coupon at your local Video Mart. Any other situation where an actual financial transaction will have to take place resulting in this film taking your money, and that just bloody well sucks.

Rated: R for gratuitous overuse of overdone realistic decapitations.
Running time: 100 minutes

When they say the tagline: YOUR DEATH MAY BE CLOSER THAN IT APPEARS it's only a segue to them asking if they can decapitate you.

P.S.- If you want to see a movie that got less of a play up than this one but was much better, try "Soul Survivor".


Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: None of the Above
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age