Final Destination 2 (2003)

Rated R, sure, for a movie that is trying to out-gore the other one.  But, maybe we should consider this an R-rated movie for the most forced gratutous nudity for only a few seconds.  My goodness, this movie wanted to hit the Scream button by attaching death to vice.  There's all kinds of various drug use and language, to really get the edgy teen market going.  And, again, I cannot stress this is a movie about creating gnarly deaths.  It does that.  R.

DIRECTOR:  David R. Ellis

If I can knock this out, I will have had an incredibly productive day without actually having completed my To-Do List for the day.  And I'll admit, I'm a little scared about this blog.  I told you in my Final Destination blog that this franchise is going to be hard to write about because it is going to hit the same beats over and over again.  I can't help but think that this blog is going to sound similar to one's written by my students.  When I read their blogs, especially when they aren't feeling like writing, it tends to be a lot of "My favorite part was this.  It was cool."

Well, we all like the logging truck.  It was cool.  

The thing about the Final Destination movies is that, when people do think about them, they think about this one.  This is the one that I remember most vividly.  It might be the entry that I stopped at.  But we all remember the logging truck.  But even more than that, I tend to remember the pane of glass smooshing poor Tim (WHOSE REAL NAME IS JAMES KIRK?).  The immediate takeaway of Final Destination 2 is that the gauntlet was laid down in terms of movie making.  I'm not saying the movie is better.  The ending, I would argue, is significantly worse.  But someone, perhaps director David Ellis, discovered that the Final Destination movies are about bigger and badder magic tricks from the special effects department.  I have to imagine these movies have some kind of script going into shooting.  But my real theory is that the director and the producer sit down with a special effects team and say, "What cool set up can we create for this movie that would put the first one to shame?"  

Like, I almost refuse to believe that the apartment fire sequence was the complete creation of a scriptwriter.  It's just that so much of Final Destination, due to its Rube Goldbergian treatment of death, is fundamentally a visual story.  I can't imagine that it says, "Cut to rich kid's hand in disposal as frying pan catches fire."  Maybe it did.  I don't know.  But the stories in these things ultimately don't matter, which brings us to a conundrum.

Final Destination 2 looks better than the first Final Destination. That's the way that it seems to happen in a lot of horror franchises.  Not always.  Sometimes, studios and producers realize that you could have done a lot of the same bits on a fraction of the budget, which is what I expect coming pretty soon for the franchise.  No, I'm talking about the fact that people really responded to nature getting elaborate with her kills.  In the second one, the kills have to be even more elaborate and even more expensive.  None of this "backyard clothes line" gets caught by wind nonsense.  The most expensive looking deathtrap in the first one is the epilogue with the characters in France.   That had to be the standard for the deaths in the second one because every single setup was over the top.  When a movie has a pretty crummy story, at least there was something to be enjoyed in the showmanship of it all.  The logging truck scene was memorable for a reason. There's a reason that we all tense up behind logging trucks on the road today.  I mean, the sheer scope of those deaths was almost hilarious.  It just kept going and going.  And it felt like most of the deaths were mostly fakeouts until something seemingly mundane did a far gorier death than you imagined.  That rich kid with his hand in the disposal didn't get his hand blended off.  He didn't catch fire.  The microwave didn't explode.  The ladder fell on him once he thought he was safe.  Tim with the pigeons?  No choking to death.  No death by sleeping gas.  No drill ripping his face apart.  Random pane of glass.  It's all pretty fun.

But Final Destination 2 hits a lot of the same snags that cryptic origin movies do.  I like when the first movie doesn't tell us a lot.  I'm still always going to refer back to Predator.  We never know about the creature and we almost don't need to.  But sequels can't get away with that garbage.  They always need to give people a reason to keep coming back.  There's new information to be gleaned.  The problem is, especially with a movie like Final Destination 2, is that the movie is better without trying to wrap it up in a box.  I love Tony Todd.  I really do.  I'm bummed that he passed, but he also has an incredible body of work that his family should be proud of.  But I will say that his character doesn't make a lick of sense.

Tony Todd's mortician, named Mr. Bludworth apparently, is the most cryptic and intentionally obtuse character out there.  But what is worse is that he's entirely built on the notion of archetype --leaning almost heavily into stereotype.  He's the wise older Black man.  I don't know if I want to know more about this character.  If the future sequels continue using Tony Todd, I don't know if I want to know more about him.  Because a lot of my frustrations come from what Tony Todd contributes as a character.  

Mr. Bludworth has a weird relationship with Death.  Part of me really wants him to just be a dude who watches the news, explaining why he knows all of the characters' names. That would be very funny and would explain why all of his cryptic suggestions are fundamentally dumb.  I hope that the clue that he gives in Final Destination 2 doesn't carry through the series because it is incredibly frustrating.  Mr. Bludworth's advice in this one is, "Death can only be reset by new life" or something like that.  That makes no sense.  The problem in this story is that these characters have cheated death.  They all have new life.  Killing and being revived really feels like a technicality in the grand scheme of things.  And isn't the point of Death in these movies more along the line of Death being angry that she has been cheated?  Why would she be happy with being cheated again?  I mean, it is also a crime that I also know the plot of Final Destination: Bloodlines, so I know that the literal meaning couldn't work.  I was kind of hoping that Isabella's baby was going to live, but not save everyone.  I just hate how matter-of-fact that there was a clean and neat ending with Kimberly drowning herself and getting revived.  It seemed like Devon Sawa was revived a whole bunch of times.

I get it. He was only revived those times.  It's not like he died between.

But here's me trying to be positive about the movie.  Because I didn't want the baby to be the solution, the reveal that Isabella was never in the original car wreck was a fun revelation.  I also really like that Clear kind of forgot that she was being hunted by Death for a good chunk of the movie. The matter of factness of getting rid of Clear as a character made me giggle quite hard.  Like, those last few moments hit incredibly hard.  So it's not like it is all bad.

Here's my thought process about Final Destination as a whole though.  I kind of love poking holes through things, so bear with me.  Some of you might find this kind of speculation insufferable, but I am trying to document a thought process I had that I probably won't remember later.  Kimberly stops the car and blocks off the on-ramp, saving all of those people from the logging truck disaster.  (I still don't know why Death is giving certain people premonitions.  I also don't like how everyone has to be tied to the first one, because that made very little sense.)  But when Kimberly blocked the on-ramp, the logging truck disaster still happened.  (It actually seemed like it somehow happened earlier.) A bunch of people were in that accident.  But since the on-ramp hadn't merged with traffic, wouldn't new deaths be accounted for?  Like, Death is mad that there are people walking around that should not be alive.  But Death isn't weirded out that there are people who are dead that should not be dead.  The traffic should have adjusted for the lack of on-ramp traffic.

So my final (destination) takeaway from Final Destination 2?  I looks way prettier.  The deaths are more fun.  But the movie is way dumber.  Also, considering that the first entry had a baller cast, I didn't recognize many people outside of Michael Landes, who played the original Jimmy Olson on Lois & Clark.  It's fun, but it's not good.