imberly (Cook) loads up her family's SUV for a trip to Daytona Beach with her best friend and their two stoner boyfriends. Once on the freeway, Kimberly notices weird things: A beer-truck driver drinking one of his brews, a logging truck with rattling chains.
When one of the chains snaps, the truck drops its load of logs onto the freeway. One smashes into the windshield of police officer Thomas Burke (Landes), killing him instantly. Lottery winner Evan Lewis (David Paetkau) smashes up his Firebird, bursting into flames. And Kimberly's red SUV overturns horrifically, landing on its top. Upside down and trapped, Kimberly watches in horror as the logging truck heads straight for her.
That's when she snaps awake and realizes she's still sitting on the freeway on-ramp. She's had a horrible premonition of death. Panicked, she pulls off the road, blocking the other drivers: Burke, Lewis and several others whom she has foreseen will die.
Burke approaches, asking her what's wrong. That's when the accident occurs again. Burke manages to save Kimberly just as the logging truck smashes into the SUV, killing her friends. Again.
Back at the police station, Burke listens as Kimberly warns the others that death may still be out there. They think she's nuts.
But when Lewis dies suddenly later that day, Burke and Kimberly realize that a pattern is repeating itself. The same pattern that occurred exactly a year earlier, when a young man had a premonition of a plane crash.
Burke and Kimberly seek out the only known survivor, Clear Rivers (Larter), who has had herself committed to a mental institution. She warns them not to drop their guard. They may have cheated death once, but death is still coming.
Beating a dead ... teenager
Final Destination 2 is the long-gestating sequel to 2000's mildly novel Final Destination, from longtime genre writing partners Glen Morgan and James Wong (The X-Files). The original film turned the teen-horror genre on its head, eliminating the big bad boogeyman in favor of Death itself, an unseen, lurking presence that dispatched its victims in the most mundane ways. The creepy implication: Death is everywhere.
For the sequel, director Ellis (who built his career as a stunt coordinator and second-unit helmer) predictably raises the ante for a new set of characters. In place of the first film's plane crash, Ellis choreographs a massive freeway crash—a preview, perhaps, of the highway chase he oversaw in the upcoming Matrix Reloaded. He also ups the gore quotient.
The results are not pretty. The appeal of the first film was its restraint, misdirection and surprise. The second tosses those, along with several victims, out the window, in favor of over-the-top action and elaborate death sequences that are more ludicrous than scary. In FD2, Death is more Rube Goldberg than Grim Reaper. This is not helped by Ellis' wink-wink-nudge-nudge take on the material, which robs it of any real scares.
The first film also attempted, albeit perfunctorily, to infuse its gloomy scenario with equally morose but interesting characters, notably Larter's Clear Rivers. The second film diminishes characterizations to nil. Rivers goes from mental patient to action heroine in the blink of an eye. Landes has little opportunity to display the quirky charm familiar to viewers of UPN's Special Unit 2. Cook spends most of the movie quivering. Other characters have no more depth than crash dummies, which is essentially what they are in this demolition derby of death.
