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A.J.
Cook, Andrew Downing, Michael Landes, Ali Larter, Tony
Todd |
Directed
by: David Ellis
Written by: Eric Bress, J. Mackye Gruber |
US:
31/01/03 UK: 07/02/03 |
Driving
with a group of friends to Daytona Beach, Kimberly 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. |
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Seeing
rich, young, good-looking actors meeting grisly ends
is always a hoot. |
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Ali
Larter reads the pre-reviews of Final Destination
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This follow-up to one of the more witty and effective teen thrillers in
memory is quite literally more of the same. In a good way. It's exactly
one year after the events of Flight 180, in which a group of teens
cheated death by getting of an ill-fated airplane, only to have death
catch up with them later. This time our heroine is Kimberly (Cook), who
has a premonition of a horrific highway pile-up and ends up saving the
lives of a disparate group of people. Then she starts to make the
connections with the earlier event, and working with a cop (Landes) she
contacts the only survivor (Larter) from the first film and they try to
stop death before it gets them all.
As with the original, this movie continually surprises us with inventive
and unexpected set pieces leading to another horrible fatality. The
genius of the concept is that there's no creepy villain lurking around
the edges of the story; everyone dies in a freak accident as death tries
to correct his mistakes. And the filmmakers have a great time setting
us up for the most grisly freak accidents possible. Some of them are
elaborate and nearly endless strings of coincidences and strange goings
on, while others are so sudden they take our breath away. All of it
leaves us laughing, not frightened. The cast is efficient and
beautiful, and just about what you expect from this genre. Todd is even
back as the wisdom-spouting mortician who seems to have some sort of
hotline to Death. The film lacks some of deranged glee that the original
had (where are the John Denver songs?), but it's still entertaining and
outrageously irreverent. And since there's probably no end of ideas for
even more elaborate death scenarios, this is a franchise that's likely
to run and run. As long as just one person survives at the end.
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