By: Cameron Tyo
April 13th, 2025
Warning: There will be what some people consider major spoilers for the movie Final Destination 2
It is a new week, and for that, it is time to watch the next installment of the Final Destination series as I continue my journey to watch every Final Destination movie for the first time in anticipation of the release of Bloodlines next month. Without further explanation, let’s dive into Final Destination 2 which was released in 2003.
Final Destination 2 starts by having different experts and news stories reflecting back on the events detailed in the last movie about the plane crash and the idea of death following the survivors whose fate was meant to be on that plane. You have a reporter acknowledging how crazy the whole idea sounds, which is something Alex had to deal with throughout the whole movie. Eventually, we are introduced to our main character and her friends, and from there, the formulaic outline of the first movie shows itself in the second.
Kimberly Corman (A.J Cook) ends up getting a premonition while driving to Daytona, where she witnesses tons of people dying due to logs from a truck becoming detached and rolling off, causing a huge pile-up of cars and bodies on the highway. She stops driving and blocks the ramp to the highway to tell her friends about the vision, whom they think is delirious, and offers to take the wheel. She refuses, and this ultimately prevents some of the victims who were to die in the pile-up from doing so, and like the first entry, death comes for them.
I think the most interesting thing about the movie, which we learn at the end, is all the people who survived death from the pile-up survived not only once but twice from death, as the characters unexpectedly escaping death in the first movie caused situations in which the main characters in this movie did actions that let them nearly escape death earlier in their lives. It wasn’t super convoluted or anything, but the movie didn’t have to add this element to explain why death is killing them in backward order, but they did. There are many references to the first movie, which, for a sequel, does make sense.
Most characters are new, as mentioned before, like Kimberly, but we have others, such as Thomas Burke (Michael Landes), an officer who actually gets roped in and believes the conspiracy of death rather than making accusatory remarks to the main character in the first movie. There is a son and mom duo, Tim (James Kirk) and Nora Carpenter (Lynda Boyd). Kat Jennings (Keegan Conor Tracy) is a businesswoman who believes everything bad is happening right as her career has taken off; Rory Peters (Jonathan Cherry) is a crackhead who adds nothing to the story, but hey, he’s just free-spirited and the skeptical but overanxious Eugenie Dix (T.C. Carson).
There were also some returning characters, such as William Bludworth (Tony Todd), who essentially acted the same way in the first movie, explaining the concept of death and its design to the main characters. It seems throughout the franchise that he will almost become a personification of death. One I wasn’t expecting to see return, however, was Clear Rivers (Ali Larter), who we learned put herself into an asylum so nothing in the outside world could kill her. She acts as a mentor to the main character, explaining how to look for signs of death and how one can escape the cycle until it eventually comes back to them.
So yeah, what I described is pretty much the same thing as the first movie, with a different coat of paint.
When it comes to the deaths in the movie, I thought they were a bit more creative, and even the deaths that come out of nowhere, despite them being over the top with their CGI and gore, such as Tim getting his body crushed into pieces by a fallen window pane are great to watch. The elevator scene and the consecutive deaths that happen in the grassy field as the gang is heading to the hospital are exhilarating to watch. Even the Rube Goldberg Machine-like moments, where you think someone is going to die a certain way, are filmed in a way that makes the death scenes seem more suspenseful.
I found it clever that almost no one in the movie knew each other until their paths became intertwined by death after they survived what was to be their end. For this reason, emotions and interactions are all over the place when it comes to how people react to things they have to say about the situations they find their selves in. However, this is expected in this movie rather than in the first movie, where most people know each other, and this effect happens because of rushed writing.
I thought that the dialogue, or at least the acting, really embraced its script’s goofiness despite the movie’s bleak tone.Unlike the first movie, where it seems the directors were trying to write a narrative first, the directors seem to focus on the deaths and then add plot devices later so they could write them more cohesively. They included plot twists throughout the movie until the very end of the movie, and those being revealed add to the suspense of the movie.
I liked the cinematography of the movie a lot. The details and shots used do a good job of showing the damaging effects the log truck had when creating the pile truck. There are a lot of moments where the camera focuses on certain things, which gives you the idea that it’s trying to foreshadow something.
Overall, I thought this movie was better than the first one. The directors took what was successful in the first movie and improved on pretty much many aspects they could. Dialogue, cinematography, the whole death scenes, and characters. If we were talking about peak films, obviously, none of these aspects would come close to being considered good, but for the series that know why people are watching, they do create those aspects in mind for them well enough. Now that Final Destination 2 is over, next week, we’re on to Final Destination 3.
With that, my rankings of the movies are now:
1. Final Destination 2
2. Final Destination