FINAL DESTINATION 2
2003
Directed by David R. Ellis
Written by Jeffrey Reddick, J. Mackye Gruber, and Eric Bress
It would be completely reasonable to consider Final Desintation 2 the highwater mark of its franchise; I no longer subscribe to that notion personally, but I understand how I used to, and it's not for lack of Final Destination 2 trying. On the one hand, Final Destination 2 is an aggressively textbook example of a sequel redoing the first film, only bigger. But on the other, 2000's Final Destination gave unto the world a formula—the Grim Reaper, having unintentionally allowed the victims of a disaster to slip through its fingers returns to correct its error, not by anything so vulgar as direct confrontation, but by rewriting the very world, so that they were seemingly always going to waltz into the improbable coincidences that balance Death's ledger—so wondrously perfect that it would've been a crime against God, which is arguably the more accurate name of this franchise's villain, if they had left it to just the one movie, and to the mere five Final Destination-style death sequences which that movie contained, when only a few (going on "just one") of those death sequences were what any observer writing twenty-six years later would be apt to describe as properly exemplifying the style to which the Final Destinations were going to lay claim to. This sequel was not merely bigger, then; it was more refined.
Arriving three years after the first, nor can it be accused of being cranked out of the Final Destination factory, though, to be clear, New Line knew what they had here, so of course it was sooner rather than later that they asked series creator Jeffrey Reddick for a follow-up. They were too late, however, to bring James Wong and Glen Morgan back into the fold, so the franchise's continuation went without its first movie's director and, if I may voice my suspicions, the more important of its three co-writers. Then again, they did come back for the next sequel. But one thing at a time.
As far as this one goes, Reddick only got a story credit, while Wong and Morgan, as screenwriters, were replaced by Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber, and David R. Ellis stepped in to direct, making this his sophomore feature after Homeward Bound II. "So a sequel specialist," one might glibly say, though where Ellis really came from was stunts and second unit directing. (2003 was Ellis's year: in addition to Final Destination 2, he directed second unit on Master and Commander and The Matrix Reloaded.) And that makes a great deal of intuitive sense, right? The Final Destinations are absolutely "films of sequences," even by slasher standards: built around kill scenes of unusual choreographic and environmental complexity (they're practically half insert shots), they are indeed dependent on the exact skills a second unit director is supposed to have, of generating the right footage to move through a sequence that's too time-consumingly complicated for the actual director to deal with, yet doing so with geographical clarity, narrative precision, and, if it be available, panache. (Ellis's own second units were led by David Barrett and Freddie Hice, stuntmen on Matrix Reloaded, Barrett being a stunt driver, which seems quite germane here.) So it seems likely, and Ellis and the writers have themselves said as much, that with Ellis in charge, they spent the years meticulously crafting the most complicated and therefore most thrilling (or, for they have not forgotten, bleakly comedic) of Death's ad hoc "accidents" as their story scaffolding and their budget would allow. Thus while that budget was only very modestly increased (to $26 million), this sequel naturally did become bigger—basically every death in it is Val's death-from-implausible-coincidence-after-coincidence from the first film—so that "bigger" is the impression it necessarily leaves, despite the film itself being eight minutes littler (a very svelte 90 minutes). Even its inciting incident, now a car wreck, which is hypothetically "smaller," feels bigger than the first film's exploding airliner.
Now, this all might be a double-edged sword. But from the outset it's not obviously reinventing the wheel, effectively copying its predecessor's opening credits montage of our protagonist's room being spooky at night (it's less ebulliently stupid, too, though "ebulliently stupid montage" arguably returns later on with this 2003 film's slack-jawed wonder at "the Internet"). The difference is a nitpick but I think goes to the difference between Final Destination and the franchise it birthed, as it's using these opening credits, also, to catch stragglers up on the whole "the villain is capital-D Death" thing, by way of a some crackpot on TV, is in much the same way the screenplay will go on to cheerfully reference the mystery Flight 180's aftermath tons of times, treating it as what amounts to common knowledge, and exploiting it for a borderline-dysfunctional efficiency but more-or-less obviating any need for Death's intended victims to grapple with the same basic mysteries of their situation, as the previous victims did, rather than the new wrinkles this entry's added. But, for now, we're concerned with Kimberly (A.J. Cook), who's going on a road trip with her friends (Sarah Carter, Alejando Rae, and Shaun Sipos), and it shall not surprise you that her trip is ill-fated, sufficiently so it might not manage to get out of the city limits: as Kimberly is discomfited by an array of little signs of doom, they find themselves behind a timber hauler that loses its logs, killing a number of motorists directly and causing an enormous pile-up that, at the last, claims Kimberly and her friends. Then, like Alex before her, Kimberly awakens back to reality—it was a vision, and now she's about to change her fate.
But we can pause, since this opening is Goddamn legendary—it's also, remarkably, a full fifth of the whole movie's runtime!—and it's precisely what I mean when I saw the Final Destinations have access to forms of horror that no other slasher franchise does. Here, it's taking its single best advantage of "being a sequel," and knowing that you know what movie you're watching if you're watching the Final Destination with a 2 on the end, assuming beyond argument that it can extract a tremendous amount of suspense over an impending disaster, just from watching this chick drive these goobers down the road, so long as Kimberly is getting increasingly worked up over coincidental signs, and it's cross-cutting around the highway to a huge number unsettling portents, virtually none of which play a part in the accident itself, because Death is as much about faking you out for its own amusement, or, less dismissively, because life is chaos, so of course it's hard to tell what's a true sign and not just your own overreaction to being bombarded with constant potential threats, overlooking the real dangers till it's too late. So it's incredibly confident stuff, building up to catastrophe and introducing nearly our entire cast within that build-up, giving most of them enough typed personality to already read, though we'll get (slightly) more detail later: stolid state trooper Thomas (Michael Landes), arrogant-but-fragile rationalist Eugene (T.C. Carson), brittle girlboss Kat (Keegan Connor Tracy), irritating stoner Rory (Jonathan Cherry), overbearing mom Nora (Lynda Boyd) and her dork son Tim (James Kirk), trashy recent lotto winner Evan (David Paetku), and pregnant delivery driver Isabella (Justina Machado).
The confidence, anyway, might be the underdiscussed part of why it's legendary; but the other part is, after all, the reason it is legend, basically just "well, it's just so good, isn't it?" And it is, a terrifically well-built dance of vehicular destruction, and strikingly gory to kick things off, when the goop that used to be Thomas gets thrown through his cop car's back windshield by one of those bouncing logs. Plus it's mostly practical: the car stunts are all tangible and real, and only the logs aren't, though it's very gratifying to know that they even tested real logs and resorted to CGI because real logs don't do that and wouldn't have been as cool. (The CGI itself is swell for mid-budget 2003: we haven't reached the point in the series where it becomes a distraction yet, and it's mostly known by how they solved the "uncannily slick" problem mainly by knocking the CGI, and perhaps even the VFX shots containing it, out of focus.)
But that's if things had gone according to Death's design, which Kimberly throws out of whack by halting her car on the on-ramp and clogging up traffic onto the highway, getting Thomas's attention, but while they debate the reliability of prophetic visions, something akin to the pile-up happens anyway, presumably claiming some whole different set of victims (let us be polite and overlook how the accident in Kimberly's vision very clearly happened at least two miles down the highway, while this one happens basically right there), plus Kimberly's friends in her car, though Thomas is able to save her. Our survivors are freaked, and while it's not until Death starts tying up its loose ends that they fully organize, Thomas does take it seriously, and Kimberly has already enlisted a very reluctant ally, hectoring old Clear (Ali Larter) out of her safe padded cell in the insane asylum she's been living in since becoming the last survivor of Flight 180.
We can excuse the awkwardness there—Devon Sawa declined to participate, and I'm obviously not convinced the writers "always" intended to kill the first film's hero offscreen and devolve his ongoing responsibilities to Clear—though I think you can perceive the rot that, however much I like this movie, has begun. Final Destination has a cast of mostly-likeable kids, and even with the unlikeable, one-dimensional ones, the movie has the decency to pretend they're not, and they all already know each other, so we have a community contemplating their powerlessness in the face of death together; Final Destination 2 opens with a cast of four that it isn't pretending aren't unlikeable and one-dimensional, and because they're removed by the end of the first scene, you could pretend that they're going to be replaced with something better (the first "real" character to die could confirm the impression that they're killing them in descending order of grating obnoxiousness), but this is barely true.
No, it's a slate of slasher meat we've got here now, of the kind that would behoove a movie to have better actors than the first to overcome the instrumentality of the roles, and it gets the reverse, with almost across-the-board worse performances with very little to attach themselves to—Cook is no Sawa, whatever the hell that means—the sole exceptions being Carson, who gets the ensemble's most interesting character by virtue of being the one who most cruelly mocks his new pals' paranoia until the mystical truth flattens him into an existentially-panicked puddle and he attempts suicide with a bunch of impossibly-dud bullets; Larter, who's fine as the grizzled survivor though the sense you get that Clear thinks she's Sarah Connor doesn't do her many favors; and Tony Todd, reprising his role as the unhelpfully-helpful mortician, though even then because his performance virtually exists outside the movie anyway, as the Final Destinations' Cryptkeeperesque host figure. By the 00s horror screenwriters had internalized the insidious critique of 80s slashers as being trash movies full of badly-written assholes the audience isn't upset to see die, which wasn't true then (it wasn't, anyway, deliberate), but was starting to become a self-fulfilling prophecy now, and hence Rory, accosting strangers to enquire if that's dogshit on his shoe and attempting to put his saliva on their faces. It's not really a big thing, even if I've made a big paragraph about it, but it does mean that if Final Destination 2 is "about" anything profounder than seeing how its cast's insides will find their way outside—Gary Capo's cinematography readily drops any abidingly crafted "mood," so if mood still happens later on it's because he has British Columbia's weather doing half his job for him**—or even has much of anything humane to it, then it's mainly because the original Final Destination casts such a long, deep shadow over it, and it hasn't completely repudiated the necessity to give lip service to humanity, though maybe it's annoying that Rory thinks more of his loved ones than our heroine, who's forgotten she even has a dad by the thirty minute mark.
Don't get me wrong: it's not obliged to do more than that. Some of it's the result of the movie's personality tipping further towards black comedy anyway, and there's nothing too wrong with it being itself and chasing after hyperviolent spectacle tinged with cosmic irony. And on that count it undeniably delivers, with some remarkably good Death. The famous opening we've already discussed; that's followed up, much more quickly (by the universe's internal clock or our progress bar) than in Final Destination, with Evan, and Evan's death is already better than any kill in the first movie (the caveat is that I think it might be better than any subsequent kills in this movie), methodically having him doom himself in his awful bachelor's kitchen, somehow getting himself into two perfectly good potentially-deadly situations with a garbage disposal and a grease fire (that becomes a house fire that becomes a gas explosion), with probably Eric Sears's best editing in the film—steep competition there, but definitely its best sound design—that uses a smoke alarm interwoven with butt-rock and answering machine messages and whooshing fire as what amounts to a madcap musical deathtrap that... doesn't even kill him. Because he actually dies from the very first thing he did, being a garbage person and throwing spaghetti out his window,* making it one of the series' most deliriously good gags and an astoundingly well-told one, given that his luck holds out even at this extreme, at least for a split-second.
But the entire mechanism was needed to get him precisely there; such is Final Destination's Death. There's also an attention to hokey detail in these sequences—in this one, a fallen alphabetic fridge magnet now spells "eye," oho, though the best "detail" comes in the next kill, which begins with Tim at the dentist's, studying an aquarium that suddenly sucks a goldfish into the filter, immobilizing it and leaving it to helplessly squirm, which is effectively what's about to happen to poor Tim. However, as with Evan, God even knows how many close calls and absurd accidents almost get Tim (and at this dentist's office, the locus of so many fears), but he dies by way of an element you'll only notice if you're paying the strictest attention, rather than all the more obvious means, and climaxed with what's got to be the movie's most memorable effect—a practical effect that would've been 100% CGI today—and so memorable that I expect you'll know what I mean that despite the aftermath depicted in the movie, I actually really doubt they bother with "body bags" for accidents this, shall we say, complete). Points, too, for killing the minor right in front of his mom.
The movie's severest problem might be that it's frontloaded, then: it remains estimably clever and gruesome, but its first half is simply moreso (then again, I might've told you its most memorable effect was a clearly cartoon-inspired dicing, but I would've told you that because this does-use-CGI effect doesn't quite come off without being cartoonish; and it's still playing with expectations, when the smoker in the gas-spewing car wreck only kills someone else with her flame). But while the reveal that the highway disaster was, itself, Death attempting to wipe out lives that had been collaterally saved in Final Destination is, I think, neat enough***, I don't like all the additions to the lore here, made as much for the sake of not literally just making Final Destination again as anything else. Our victims now pursue a possible escape from Death that works much better as mechanically proficient screenwriting—lubricated with some rather disagreeable bullshit, mind you, that the movie enthusiastically-badly explains with "one of the survivors is a cop, which besides his ridiculous mansion of an apartment, grants him omnipotence over all law enforcement resources"—with a "twist" that's more well-made in its misdirects, and in Kimberly's unexamined assumption that she's seeing POV shots from some other victim's eyes, than it is a twist that's legitimately satisfying. ("Only new life can defeat Death," they learn, and while I suppose it's all for the best that Final Destination 2 ultimately declines to weigh in on that debate, if I were Kimberly I'd have gotten inseminated ASAP. While we're bitching, I also don't think Kimberly needed to destroy a whole $200,000 emergency vehicle to aspirate water and achieve her phony, rules-lawyering "death".) And—you know—Final Destination 2 has the only denouement in the franchise that, fun and comically macabre as it is (that tilt from a woman screaming to that barbecued arm is a great final shot), to suggest our "heroes" actually made it, which feels actively wrong. But for all that the franchise is already showing its fundamental limits, in its determination that the only way forward was to amp up the dark humor and swerve into jokey pastiche, Final Destination 2 still strikes something like the correct balance for that; I'm still happy to think of it as the necessary counterpart to the first.
Score: 8/10
*I mean, I do this also, but I have a backyard full of birds and racoons and such, not an rotting urban alleyway.
**Apparently we're "in" Michigan.
***According to this, Death likewise has dominion over homicides, which opens up a philosophical can of worms probably best left unexplored.
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