My trip through the Final Destination Series Continues with a Fond Look Back at Final Destination 2

These ridiculous movies are just what I need right now

Spending long years writing The Fractured Mirror, my upcoming book about American movies about filmmaking gave me a new appreciation for stunt people. 

While researching the massive tome, I became a fan of stunt movies as a fascinating and vibrant subgenre. These movies made me appreciate the brave men and women who risk their lives to make movie stars look good in a new way. 

But I also became fascinated by stunt performers who made the leap into the director’s chair. I’m talking about legends like Hal Needham, Burt Reynolds’ auteur of choice, and the legendary stuntman-turned-director of movies like Hooper or Chad Stahelski and David Leitch, the stuntmen turned John Wick directors. 

So, I was not surprised that surfer, stuntman, second unit director, and director David R. Ellis turned out to be an inspired choice for Final Destination when original director James Wong was busy with The One. 

I know Ellis primarily as the director of Snakes on a Plane, a movie that I should have loved. I’ve made a career out of celebrating the ridiculous, campy, and unintentionally hilarious. 

Yet Snakes On a Plane left me cold when I reviewed it for The A.V. Club at the time of its release and when I covered it for my short-lived Sub-Cult column at Rotten Tomatoes. 

Though he had plenty of help from an internet intent on ghost-writing the film, or at least choice bits of dialogue involving a certain beloved character, express his frustration with all of the motherfucking snakes aboard a motherfucking plane. 

Incidentally, if you Google “What is the famous line from Snakes on a Plane?” The first thing that comes up on IMDB is, “Everybody listen! We have to put a barrier between us and the snakes!” which I do not think is a satisfying or accurate answer. 

The kooky thing about Ellis’ career as a director is that Final Destination 2 nails the tone Snakes On a Plane was going for but never quite achieved, at once goofy, campy, tongue-in-cheek, and very at peace with its own ridiculousness. 

Final Destination 2 is what Snakes On a Plane should have been: a camp classic that might not be “good” but is a hell of a lot of fun. 

The blood-splattered goofiness begins with a gloriously extended opening set piece introducing us to heroine Kimberly Corman (AJ Cook), her doomed fellow college students, and the initially very lucky and then extremely unlucky folks who (temporarily) survive a massive crash at the entry route of Route 23. 

They’re the usual assortment of broad cinematic types. There’s whacked-out illicit substance enthusiast Rory Peters, who, in his most emotional moment onscreen, solemnly asks our heroine to get rid of all of his pornography, drugs, and drug paraphernalia after he dies so that his mother isn’t disappointed to learn that her son was the degenerate she obviously knew him to be. 

T.C. Carson plays a teacher who is a skeptic about supernatural mumbo jumbo but also, confusingly, the stock character in these films who angrily insists that he’s not about to wait for Death to sneak up on his with a crazy freak death when he can outwit it by committing suicide.

They’re joined by mother Nora Carpenter (Lynda Boyd) and her teenage son Tim (James Kirk), the pregnant Isabella Hudson (Justina Machado), business-minded Kat Jennings (Keegan Connor Tracy), and finally, trooper Thomas Burke (Michael Landes). 

When they’re introduced, a countdown begins for when they will die and how. One thing is for sure: they’re all gonna fucking die, and it won’t be pretty. 

Ellis and screenwriters J. Mackye Gruber and Eric Bress, best known as the scribes of the conceptually similar and similarly ridiculous The Butterfly Effect, toy mercilessly with audience expectations. 

In any given set piece, the abstract concept of death, AKA the movie’s bad, bad guy, comes at the characters from all manner of angles, most of them kooky and unexpected. A character will escape death thirteen times only to prove murderously unlucky the fourteenth time.

The filmmakers stretch things out by making the big opening set piece as long, involved, deadly, and full of fake-outs, misdirection, and red herrings as possible. It’s downright sadistic. 

Ellis, Gruber, and Bress know that audiences are there for the kills, so they prolong the set piece until it threatens to take up the entire first act. 

It doesn’t take much to make the franchise’s underlying conceit comic. All you need to do is exaggerate things by ten percent to turn the sequel into a winning, winking exercise in self-parody. 

Final Destination was a convoluted supernatural thriller with a streak of dark comedy. Its sequels, semi-sharp contrast, it is a goofy comedy with thriller elements. 

If there’s one thing the characters in the Final Destination films have in common, it’s that they’re dead, and they didn’t die of natural causes. A notable exception is Clear Rivers, the Final Girl Ali Larter played in the original film. 

Devon Sawa’s paranoid protagonist made it to the end of Final Destination, but the sick fucks chose to kill him between the first film and the second. 

That makes Larter and Tony Todd rare returning stars in a series that loves to murder its cast. Clear Rivers isn’t properly re-introduced until half an hour in. 

Larter was underserved by an original that, to be fair, had very little interest in its characters beyond their capacity to die in weird and unexpected ways. 

Final Destination 2 gives Larter much more to work with by making her character understandably half-mad with survivor’s guilt and fear after her entire social circle meets unfortunate yet inevitable and predictable ends. 

Clear’s thinking is not so clear. It’s quite cloudy, so she institutionalizes herself on the questionable logic that Death would have a hard time reaching her if she’s in a padded cell. 

Kimberly researches and discovers that one year before the film's events, something suspiciously similar, some might even say identical, happened to a group of teenagers and a doomed flight. 

She seeks out Clear, who checks out of the loony bin (I can call it that; I’m an ex-mental patient) so that she can help her new acquaintance cheat death. She also introduces Kimberley to Todd’s Mr. Bloodworth, who introduces a new wrinkle: that new life can beat Death’s design. 

When a character gets an iconic introduction positing them as the bad motherfucker with spooky insight into matters of life and death, it sure helps to have an icon like Todd, who more than lives up to his billing. 

It’s a shame Todd did not live long enough to be a grand old man of horror like Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, or Peter Cushing before him, but he sure fit a lot of awesomeness into his 69 years. 

Part of what I love about Todd in these movies is that he is a font of peculiar wisdom, but he also just seems to like fucking with freaked-out white kids. I don’t blame him. 

Final Destination 2 goes to ridiculous extremes to connect the sequel to its predecessor. It’s not enough to bring back Clear (and Todd as Mr. Bludworth) to drop knowledge on the new batch of doomed survivors; it gives every single one of the new survivors an ADDITIONAL connection to the first film by having them all interact (sort of) with similarly cursed souls from Final Destination. 

It’s less organic than eye-roll-inducingly cheesy. That’s not necessarily bad, as Final Destination is enjoyable in a very cheesy fashion. 

Final Destination 2 is not as good as its predecessor. It’s not as well-made, but it is more fun because it fully embraces the goofiness of its premise. It deliberately chooses to be even dumber than the first one. Getting REALLY stupid paradoxically turns out to be a wise decision.