In 2000, Final Destination provided some much needed originality to the horror genre, doing away with any kind of physical killer and inserting Death itself instead to provide suspense and horror. The movie was smart and exciting; Final Destination 2 is quite the antithesis.

A.J. Cook, Michael Landes and Ali Larter (reprising her role as Clear Rivers) star as three of the people waiting the inevitable. After a terrible car accident that Kimberly (Cook) witnessed in a premonition, the survivors start dying one by one, but this time in reverse order. The stories of what happened to the survivors of Flight 180 have been on the news for a year, so Kim quickly seeks out the one survivor, Clear, and enlists her help to save them. Of course, that isn't going to a damn thing.

No one expected Final Destination 2 to be anywhere as good as the first movie, but it had the potential to still be exciting. Unfortunately, coupled with annoying characters and terrible dialogue, and plenty of things that just make no sense, Final Destination 2 is one of the worst movies of the year. The movie is just plain stupid, and should have gone directly to video.

The first major scene, of course, is the car wreck. This scene is elaborate enough, but quickly escalates to making no sense. After Kim's premonition ends, the movie jumps back a little ways where she makes her decision to block traffic. Shortly after, the wreck happens, and not far down the road at all. What makes no sense is that the wreck happens only a 100 or so yards away from the on-ramp, yet in the premonition Kim was driving for quite some time. Furthermore, if she had not blocked traffic, they would have been well ahead of the logging truck that causes the accident.

All of this may seem like nitpicking at a horror movie, but it is only the beginning.

The rest of the movie is filled with bloody death scenes and horribly cheesy dialogue. Ali Larter, who has been pretty good in all of the movies she has been in, and A.J. Cook team up to deliver some of the worst dialogue this year, the problem being that Larter nows plays "the survivor from the first movie that knows exactly what is going to happen." Also, since this is a sequel and all of the characters know what happened in the first movie, they are all quick to believe in what is going to happen to them. This leads to many stupid lines where Cook says she knows what is going to happen ("They're going to be killed by pigeons!").

When sequels reaches the point where the characters aren't even remotely skeptical about what is going on, that is a clear sign that the series should end. Final Destination 2 could avoided some of this had it dropped all of the characters from the first movie, so as the new ones could at least make some assumptions on their own, but then again, that probably would have meant it would have gone direct-to-video.

It should have. Final Destination 2 isn't even remotely scary, and has about as much suspense in it as Sense and Sensibility. The characters are dumb, the dialogue is dumb and the ending is extremely dumb. By the way, the use of three "dumbs" in the last sentence still is more intelligent than any sentence in the screenplay.

The only thing that makes the movie slightly worth it are the deaths. While not nearly elaborate or clever as in the first movie, there is more than enough gore to whet horror fan's appetites.

Of course, what are death scenes without a good movie to back them up?

Review by Erik Samdahl unless otherwise indicated.