In the original Final Destination movie, a group of American high school students board a plane en route to Paris for a class field trip. When one of the students suddenly has a vision of the plane blowing up, he freaks out and causes a panic that gets him and several other people kicked off the plane. While they argue amongst themselves in the airport lobby, the plane takes off and explodes in midair. The rest of the movie is about how those kids cheated death when they were meant to die, and they all soon die in freak accidents. The idea is that when it is your time to go, there is nothing you can do to stop it.

In this sequel with the contradictory title of Final Destination 2, it takes place exactly one year after the plane crash. A young girl is about to go on a summer trip with some friends when she has a vision of a logging truck accident that results in a huge pile-up on the Interstate and a lot of people are killed. She panics and blocks an onramp while the people she foresaw dying honk their horns in protest behind her. When a Highway Patrol officer pulls up to find out what is going on, they delay things long enough to see the truck accident that they would all have been involved in had the girl not blocked the onramp.

With this film, a group of people have once more cheated death. However, they are all aware of what happened to the survivors of the plane from the first movie, so they do a little research and formulate an idea behind what is going on. Despite their best attempts, they start getting killed one by one as the story unfolds. There is a cool surprise regarding the first movie and how it involves what happens with this one, but other than that the plot is pretty much the same.

As a general rule with most horror or action movie sequels, there must be a higher body count and more elaborate death scenes. Final Destination 2 is no different. In fact, I thought this sequel was much better than the original. Even though some of the death scenes are downright silly and unreal, they still have a coolness factor that makes them fun to watch.

The main drawback of this movie is the way the other characters react when someone is killed. At first, there is a lot of screaming, but they quickly recover as if nothing happened. Toward the end, some of the characters have no reaction at all. For example, one of the coolest death scenes is where a flying section of fence trisects a victim. As he falls apart into the three separate pieces that spatter on the ground, two of the girls just look at him like nothing happened, then run away. Because the characters don't react too realistically to the situation, it is difficult for the viewer to get too into their problem. In a way, you want them to get killed off just to see the creative ways they go.

What makes this movie so entertaining is the excellent visual effects and action sequences. The incredible accident sequence involving the logging truck is worth the cost of renting this movie. After watching the movie, I went back and watched the big wreck again. It is masterfully edited together and has some awesome stunts. All of the death scenes are set up in such a way that you can figure out what is about to happen before it does, so there aren't many surprises in that regard, but there's a lot of gore!

This movie is only 90 minutes long and it takes about 20 minutes to setup the beginning, so a lot of development is packed into that last hour before the credits roll. There are no romantic interests and you don't get to know anything about the characters until a surprise is thrown into a conversation they all have while riding together in a car. Just like the first film, this one has a sort of abrupt cliffhanger ending that leaves room for a sequel. Given the success of this and the original film, I am sure Final Destination 3 is already in the works.


Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD