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Feb. 2nd, 2007 06:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yendiFinal Destination 2. 2003. Directed by David R. Ellis. Written by J. Mackye Gruber and Eric Bress. Distributed by New Line.
The Final Destination series is, on balance, probably the most ludicrous series out there. I mean, sure, I get the idea that Death -- in some vague anthropomorphized form as either God, a petty deity, or just the universe itself tidying up -- has a Master Plan, and when those goddamn free-will touting anti-Calvinists* do something stupid like get off an airplane or highway before a major accident, Death needs to set things right.
Of course, I'm not sure why the universe, if it has such an important Master Plan, also lets people get prophetic visions of major disasters in time to avoid them. But that's only a minor issue.
The big thing that I don't get is why Death makes things so complicated. Six people survived a crash that should have killed them, and you want to re-jigger the universe to off them with the least amount of effort? Why not give them aneurysms?
And yeah, I know the answer: Aneurysms would make for boring movies.
Anyway, once you get past the initial issue, and accept that Death is actually Rube Goldberg with a bigger budget, these movies can be kind of fun. And the second movie in the series is my personal favorite. All you really need to know about the first movie is that A) an airplane crashed last year, killing everyone but a handful of folks who got off based on one of their premonitions; and B) most of the folks who survived died in ludicrously complicated ways shortly thereafter.
This movie opens with Kimberly (played by minor-league genre queen A.J. Cook) and her three disposable friends heading out for a road trip. As she's about to merge onto the highway, she has a long and complex vision of the next ten minutes, introducing us briefly to a number of victims before initiating the big accident. It all starts when a log falls off a truck, crushing the head of a state trooper (played by Michael Landes**. This initiates a chain reaction that leads to dozens of deaths and millions in property damage, as cars burn, trucks explode, and (in a nifty piece of irony), a motorcycle rider manages to get thrown ahead of his bike and eventually crushed by his own skidding vehicle. The sequence ends with Kimberly's car, upside down, getting rammed by a truck. It's a hell of a well-done clusterfuck, but not a real one. Kimberly swerves her car, blocking the on-ramp, and thus saves everyone.
Well, except for her three disposable friends. See, they waited in the car when Kimberly got out, and the truck, out of nowhere, still manages to ram them.
Kimberly explains her reckless endangerment to the cops, and they let everyone go after giving us a chance to meet the folks on Death's list. We have a mother and teenage son, a coke addict, a cute but bitchy young professional, and a schoolteacher. They go their separate ways, but Kimberly has convinced the state trooper that there's something weird going on.
Meanwhile, there's one guy who wasn't a part of that group -- lottery winner Evan. He has what may be the most ludicrous and complicated death scene in film history. Let's see if we can set this up properly:
He comes home to his walk-up apartment (nearly tripping on toys left out on the stairs, but that would be too simple for Death) and throws a plate of old spaghetti out the window into an alley. He then starts heating up some food on the stove and gets Chinese food leftovers out of the fridge (failing to notice the fridge magnet that falls into the latter before tossing it into the microwave). While checking his voicemail (turns out that every women he ever dated heard about the lottery win), the microwave starts to spark. He drops the ring he was holding, and it falls into the garbage disposal, where his hand also gets stuck as he reaches after it. While getting his hand out, the food on the stove catches fire, and sparks a grease fire that spreads to the rest of the kitchen. He extricates himself from the disposal, but all of a sudden, the windows slam shut and lock, and the fire is between Evan and the door! Evan breaks a window with a chair and makes it down the fire escape just as his apartment explodes (presumably killing other folks, but Death probably considers them collateral damage). The ladder sticks before going all the way down, so he jumps down to the street, where he slips on the pasta he discarded earlier, and as he lies there stunned, the fire escape ladder falls the rest of the way, impaling him through his eyes.
Whew. After a sequence like that, Death deserves a fucking choreography award. It's the most complicated chain of events since a cat eating one little kid*** led to an all-out brawl between God and the Angel of Death.
Our next victim is the teenage kid. See, it turns out that Death has an official Order in which Folks Must Die. And when things get fucked up, Death goes after them in reverse order from how they were originally doomed. Because Death has a bizarre and complex case of OCD.
Anyway, Timmy (in case you cared about his name) goes through an equally long and tense sequence at the dentist's office, as he almost dies from overdosing on gas and from a toy dropping in his mouth. These events are abated by pigeons flying into the window and distracting the dentist, and a leaky fishtank that causes a short circuit, respectively. But Timmy makes it out of the dentist's office alive****. Just as Kim and the state trooper see Tim and his mother and try to warn them about Death's plan, Timmy runs at a flock of pigeons, and they fly away, distracting the man operating a crane that's holding a huge piece of glass suspended right above Timmy. In a rather nice effect, the pane falls on Timmy and crushes him.
Oh, I guess I should get back to the non-Death parts of the plot. See, Kim and the Trooper (whose name is Thomas) have been doing research. And they've discovered the story of what happened to the survivors of the first film, and even found sole survivor Clear (Ali Larter), who has escaped death by living in a padded cell and hoping that Death still doesn't remember how to give aneurysms. They also find Tony Todd, repeating his role as the Mortician Who Knows Everything from the first movie. He explains that "only a new life can defeat Death." He doesn't actually add "in bed" to the end of that warning, but you just know that he ganked the advice from a fortune cookie.
After Tim's death, Kim and Thomas gather the other survivors, and are joined by Clear as well. There are a few false scares (Death was warming up) as the theory and mythology behind the movie is explained, and we learn that yet another survivor of the opening scene was a pregnant lady, and Kim has visions of her being killed in a hospital. Saving her could stop that dastardly Death!
The group splits up; Timmy's mom, Nora, and the schoolteacher/biker, Eugene, end up on an elevator with a creepy man with a box of prosthetic hands. While he's busy sniffing her hair, she gets a phone call, and when she drops the phone and kneels down for it, gets her braid caught on one of the prosthetics. The call (from Trooper Thomas) warns her of the man with the hands, so she tries to get off the elevator. Alas, the door closes on her head as she's trying to pull away from the box o' hands, and the elevator starts to move up, decapitating the poor woman and plopping her head right into the elevator.
The remaining survivors figure this is a good time for a drive, so they hit the road for more exposition (and to go witness the pregnant lady give birth). We learn that all of them should have died last year, but didn't as the result of actions taken by characters from the first movie. So Death's got some sort of super grudge against these folks. Also, Kimberly was supposed to die in the SUV with her disposable friends in the opening scene, so saving her reset her death counter so that she's now last. There's a Death rulebook somewhere for this sort of thing.
Anyway, after much talk (and a near meltdown from Eugene, who tries to commit suicide with Thomas's gun, but it's not his turn yet), we get a car accident. Ironically, it's caused when their care nearly hits the van carrying the pregnant (and now laboring) lady; the car runs off the road, and a chunk of wood rams into the front door, pinning Kat (the hot young professional) into her seat. A group of PVC pipes also impale the car, puncturing Eugene's lung and impaling Kat's headrest (missing her head by inches).
Eugene is rushed to the hospital as rescue workers attempt to free Kat. The Jaws of Life (ha!) set off the car's airbag, sending Kat's head right back into the piece of pipe that she'd avoided earlier. Her cigarette falls from her dead hand and blows in the wind until it lands in some gasoline that was leaking from a news truck that was covering the crash. That, in turn, sets off an explosion that sends a chunk of barbed wire fence flying through the air, slicing coke-snorting Rory into pieces.
The survivors make it to the hospital, and Clear goes to check on Eugene. Death, being a feisty sort, was sitting around Eugene's room turning on all the oxygen tanks and closing the vents. When Clear opens the door, it unplugs a machine, creating a spark and making the room go boom! Death has just taken out four folks in about five minutes, and now it's coming for Kim and Thomas!
Incidentally, we learn during this mess that the pregnant woman, like Communism in Clue, was a red herring. She was never meant to die in the crash, and Kim only thought she was having visions of her. Turns out they were visions of her own death. So Kim drives an ambulance into a lake and drowns herself to break the cycle. Although Kim's heart stops (which is all that Death really needs, it seems), the doctors are able to revive her, and the cycle is broken.
We cut to a happy picnic a few months later, as Kim and Thomas are eating with a family that helped them after the crash. The son goes to tend to the barbecue, and his family mentions how coke-snorting Rory saved the son from being run over by a news van in the middle of that chaos. Sure enough, this pisses off Death, and Death blows up the barbecue. As the kid's severed arm lands in front of his mom, we cut to the credits.
As I've said throughout, the Final Destination series is predicated on a silly concept, an invisible and omnipotent villain, and rules that the characters have to guess at. If you go into any of these movies expecting something more than that, you deserve to be disappointed.
That said, for a movie that requires you to check your brain at the door, Final Destination 2 is a fun picture. Director David Ellis (who also helmed Cellular and Snakes on a Plane) does a fine job of setting a fast pace, the better to overlook the silliness of the entire concept. The cast, which is filled with surprisingly minor stars for a higher-profile contemporary horror flick, does a good enough job bringing some (temporary) life to the archetypal characters. And writers Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber (the duo behind The Butterfly Effect and Kyle XY) turn in a script that only lags when it makes the mistake of trying to explain what's going on.
Final Destination 2 isn't technically a good movie. But it's a perfectly fun sequel that takes its already-silly concept to some wonderfully ridiculous new heights.
*Yeah, I know I'm oversimplifying Calvinism. Roll with it.
**Oh, and I'm still pissed off about the cancelation of Special Unit 2, dammit.
***That my father bought for two zuzim.
****If I made a Corbin Bernsen joke here, would any of you get it? Come to think of it, did any of you get the Had Gadya reference?
The Final Destination series is, on balance, probably the most ludicrous series out there. I mean, sure, I get the idea that Death -- in some vague anthropomorphized form as either God, a petty deity, or just the universe itself tidying up -- has a Master Plan, and when those goddamn free-will touting anti-Calvinists* do something stupid like get off an airplane or highway before a major accident, Death needs to set things right.
Of course, I'm not sure why the universe, if it has such an important Master Plan, also lets people get prophetic visions of major disasters in time to avoid them. But that's only a minor issue.
The big thing that I don't get is why Death makes things so complicated. Six people survived a crash that should have killed them, and you want to re-jigger the universe to off them with the least amount of effort? Why not give them aneurysms?
And yeah, I know the answer: Aneurysms would make for boring movies.
Anyway, once you get past the initial issue, and accept that Death is actually Rube Goldberg with a bigger budget, these movies can be kind of fun. And the second movie in the series is my personal favorite. All you really need to know about the first movie is that A) an airplane crashed last year, killing everyone but a handful of folks who got off based on one of their premonitions; and B) most of the folks who survived died in ludicrously complicated ways shortly thereafter.
This movie opens with Kimberly (played by minor-league genre queen A.J. Cook) and her three disposable friends heading out for a road trip. As she's about to merge onto the highway, she has a long and complex vision of the next ten minutes, introducing us briefly to a number of victims before initiating the big accident. It all starts when a log falls off a truck, crushing the head of a state trooper (played by Michael Landes**. This initiates a chain reaction that leads to dozens of deaths and millions in property damage, as cars burn, trucks explode, and (in a nifty piece of irony), a motorcycle rider manages to get thrown ahead of his bike and eventually crushed by his own skidding vehicle. The sequence ends with Kimberly's car, upside down, getting rammed by a truck. It's a hell of a well-done clusterfuck, but not a real one. Kimberly swerves her car, blocking the on-ramp, and thus saves everyone.
Well, except for her three disposable friends. See, they waited in the car when Kimberly got out, and the truck, out of nowhere, still manages to ram them.
Kimberly explains her reckless endangerment to the cops, and they let everyone go after giving us a chance to meet the folks on Death's list. We have a mother and teenage son, a coke addict, a cute but bitchy young professional, and a schoolteacher. They go their separate ways, but Kimberly has convinced the state trooper that there's something weird going on.
Meanwhile, there's one guy who wasn't a part of that group -- lottery winner Evan. He has what may be the most ludicrous and complicated death scene in film history. Let's see if we can set this up properly:
He comes home to his walk-up apartment (nearly tripping on toys left out on the stairs, but that would be too simple for Death) and throws a plate of old spaghetti out the window into an alley. He then starts heating up some food on the stove and gets Chinese food leftovers out of the fridge (failing to notice the fridge magnet that falls into the latter before tossing it into the microwave). While checking his voicemail (turns out that every women he ever dated heard about the lottery win), the microwave starts to spark. He drops the ring he was holding, and it falls into the garbage disposal, where his hand also gets stuck as he reaches after it. While getting his hand out, the food on the stove catches fire, and sparks a grease fire that spreads to the rest of the kitchen. He extricates himself from the disposal, but all of a sudden, the windows slam shut and lock, and the fire is between Evan and the door! Evan breaks a window with a chair and makes it down the fire escape just as his apartment explodes (presumably killing other folks, but Death probably considers them collateral damage). The ladder sticks before going all the way down, so he jumps down to the street, where he slips on the pasta he discarded earlier, and as he lies there stunned, the fire escape ladder falls the rest of the way, impaling him through his eyes.
Whew. After a sequence like that, Death deserves a fucking choreography award. It's the most complicated chain of events since a cat eating one little kid*** led to an all-out brawl between God and the Angel of Death.
Our next victim is the teenage kid. See, it turns out that Death has an official Order in which Folks Must Die. And when things get fucked up, Death goes after them in reverse order from how they were originally doomed. Because Death has a bizarre and complex case of OCD.
Anyway, Timmy (in case you cared about his name) goes through an equally long and tense sequence at the dentist's office, as he almost dies from overdosing on gas and from a toy dropping in his mouth. These events are abated by pigeons flying into the window and distracting the dentist, and a leaky fishtank that causes a short circuit, respectively. But Timmy makes it out of the dentist's office alive****. Just as Kim and the state trooper see Tim and his mother and try to warn them about Death's plan, Timmy runs at a flock of pigeons, and they fly away, distracting the man operating a crane that's holding a huge piece of glass suspended right above Timmy. In a rather nice effect, the pane falls on Timmy and crushes him.
Oh, I guess I should get back to the non-Death parts of the plot. See, Kim and the Trooper (whose name is Thomas) have been doing research. And they've discovered the story of what happened to the survivors of the first film, and even found sole survivor Clear (Ali Larter), who has escaped death by living in a padded cell and hoping that Death still doesn't remember how to give aneurysms. They also find Tony Todd, repeating his role as the Mortician Who Knows Everything from the first movie. He explains that "only a new life can defeat Death." He doesn't actually add "in bed" to the end of that warning, but you just know that he ganked the advice from a fortune cookie.
After Tim's death, Kim and Thomas gather the other survivors, and are joined by Clear as well. There are a few false scares (Death was warming up) as the theory and mythology behind the movie is explained, and we learn that yet another survivor of the opening scene was a pregnant lady, and Kim has visions of her being killed in a hospital. Saving her could stop that dastardly Death!
The group splits up; Timmy's mom, Nora, and the schoolteacher/biker, Eugene, end up on an elevator with a creepy man with a box of prosthetic hands. While he's busy sniffing her hair, she gets a phone call, and when she drops the phone and kneels down for it, gets her braid caught on one of the prosthetics. The call (from Trooper Thomas) warns her of the man with the hands, so she tries to get off the elevator. Alas, the door closes on her head as she's trying to pull away from the box o' hands, and the elevator starts to move up, decapitating the poor woman and plopping her head right into the elevator.
The remaining survivors figure this is a good time for a drive, so they hit the road for more exposition (and to go witness the pregnant lady give birth). We learn that all of them should have died last year, but didn't as the result of actions taken by characters from the first movie. So Death's got some sort of super grudge against these folks. Also, Kimberly was supposed to die in the SUV with her disposable friends in the opening scene, so saving her reset her death counter so that she's now last. There's a Death rulebook somewhere for this sort of thing.
Anyway, after much talk (and a near meltdown from Eugene, who tries to commit suicide with Thomas's gun, but it's not his turn yet), we get a car accident. Ironically, it's caused when their care nearly hits the van carrying the pregnant (and now laboring) lady; the car runs off the road, and a chunk of wood rams into the front door, pinning Kat (the hot young professional) into her seat. A group of PVC pipes also impale the car, puncturing Eugene's lung and impaling Kat's headrest (missing her head by inches).
Eugene is rushed to the hospital as rescue workers attempt to free Kat. The Jaws of Life (ha!) set off the car's airbag, sending Kat's head right back into the piece of pipe that she'd avoided earlier. Her cigarette falls from her dead hand and blows in the wind until it lands in some gasoline that was leaking from a news truck that was covering the crash. That, in turn, sets off an explosion that sends a chunk of barbed wire fence flying through the air, slicing coke-snorting Rory into pieces.
The survivors make it to the hospital, and Clear goes to check on Eugene. Death, being a feisty sort, was sitting around Eugene's room turning on all the oxygen tanks and closing the vents. When Clear opens the door, it unplugs a machine, creating a spark and making the room go boom! Death has just taken out four folks in about five minutes, and now it's coming for Kim and Thomas!
Incidentally, we learn during this mess that the pregnant woman, like Communism in Clue, was a red herring. She was never meant to die in the crash, and Kim only thought she was having visions of her. Turns out they were visions of her own death. So Kim drives an ambulance into a lake and drowns herself to break the cycle. Although Kim's heart stops (which is all that Death really needs, it seems), the doctors are able to revive her, and the cycle is broken.
We cut to a happy picnic a few months later, as Kim and Thomas are eating with a family that helped them after the crash. The son goes to tend to the barbecue, and his family mentions how coke-snorting Rory saved the son from being run over by a news van in the middle of that chaos. Sure enough, this pisses off Death, and Death blows up the barbecue. As the kid's severed arm lands in front of his mom, we cut to the credits.
As I've said throughout, the Final Destination series is predicated on a silly concept, an invisible and omnipotent villain, and rules that the characters have to guess at. If you go into any of these movies expecting something more than that, you deserve to be disappointed.
That said, for a movie that requires you to check your brain at the door, Final Destination 2 is a fun picture. Director David Ellis (who also helmed Cellular and Snakes on a Plane) does a fine job of setting a fast pace, the better to overlook the silliness of the entire concept. The cast, which is filled with surprisingly minor stars for a higher-profile contemporary horror flick, does a good enough job bringing some (temporary) life to the archetypal characters. And writers Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber (the duo behind The Butterfly Effect and Kyle XY) turn in a script that only lags when it makes the mistake of trying to explain what's going on.
Final Destination 2 isn't technically a good movie. But it's a perfectly fun sequel that takes its already-silly concept to some wonderfully ridiculous new heights.
*Yeah, I know I'm oversimplifying Calvinism. Roll with it.
**Oh, and I'm still pissed off about the cancelation of Special Unit 2, dammit.
***That my father bought for two zuzim.
****If I made a Corbin Bernsen joke here, would any of you get it? Come to think of it, did any of you get the Had Gadya reference?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-03 12:01 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-03 12:09 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-03 12:30 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-03 12:42 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-03 12:43 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-03 12:44 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-03 01:11 am (UTC)2. Right after this movie came out, a doctor in a local hospital (in San Antonio) actually DID die that way. Crazy.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-03 02:27 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-03 02:31 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-03 04:44 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-04 03:45 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-07 06:29 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-07 04:28 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-14 04:40 am (UTC)But I just had to say that, after a youth of reading a Haggadah all the way through to the end during the seder each year (because there's nothing ELSE to do when you're a smart kid who's also mildly ADD), I saw the words "for two zuzim" here and nearly crapped my pants laughing.
Thank you. That was awesome.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-14 04:08 pm (UTC)