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Destination 2 (2003) |
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The first Final Destination movie arrived in the post Scream/I Know What You Did Last Summer phase of horror movies and was hailed by horror fans as a novel and refreshing idea – a welcome change from the psycho slasher teen fare that seemed to have self-parodied itself to a premature oblivion. The original movie was about a group of kids who “cheat” death by getting off a plane they were supposed to have travelled on due to one of them having a deadly premonition. In the memorable opening from the first film the audience watches in horror as the huge 747 explodes lighting up the night like a giant fire-cracker while the handful of kids who unexpectedly got off the plane are safe, alive having cheated deaths design as it were. A story line that might not be the work of genius yet provides an interesting, macabre and fresh twist to a genre badly in need of new ideas. The film became a sleeper horror hit upon its release and has now spawned a sequel which is actually more like a re-run with a few new highly unlikely plot twists thrown in. Essentially the emphasis is on reproducing a series of gratuitously grisly creative “death by accident” scenes which were such the hallmark of the first instalment. Things begin most promisingly with another premonition followed by a spectacular pile up on the motorway. A bunch of people (mostly young adults) survive the catastrophe thereby “denying deaths design” and pissing death off into finding new and far more elaborate and nasty ways of dispatching this new set of cheaters. One by one each of the survivors is caught up in elaborately designed and staged “accidents” according to “deaths list” and the girl who is suffering from the deadly premonitions has to seek out he guidance of Ali Larter who survived the “death list” in the last movie but who has now hitched herself up in a loony bin in where she thinks she can dodge death for a little while longer. As the film progresses and the elaborate deaths begin to pile up, the scriptwriters have to frame all the spectacular creative deaths within something resembling a plausible plot line. This is where the film comes horribly undone as in the effort to provide explanations for the freaky events on screen the scriptwriters go completely haywire and the plausibility factor which was threadbare at best to begin with is now lost in a tangle of utterly ridiculous diatribes about “Deaths list” and watching out for “signs” and to confound death how one must somehow upset the order in which people are supposed to die. The plot lurches from the sublime to the ridiculous and way beyond, and by the time the film gravitates towards its highly fangled conclusion with our damsel in distress plunging her car into a lake to flummox death into ultimate surrender, the audience has long since stopped caring. The good things about the film are some of the spectacularly staged creative death scenes which will have viewers squirming in expectant agony - the fellow with his hand caught in the waste disposal unit, the lad having his teeth drilled by an absent minded dentist and indeed the splendidly gruesome opening pile up. There are numerous well staged spectacular deaths the threat that attempts to hold the plot together and to provide some semblance of logic or plausibility is simply non existent and that is where the movie suffers fatally. The direction is tight and the action is fluid yet not enough to overcome the inherent weaknesses that the script suffers from. The moment we start getting into explanations for events on screen is the moment the film goes horribly off track. Sometimes its better not to offer explanations than to expect audiences to digest the utterly ridiculous. The DVD is a spectacular one offering stunning sound in DTS ES 6.1 with a fabulously crisp video transfer. The film is actually fairly entertaining for the stylishly staged death sequences but the moment people open their mouths to talk, only garbage comes out which somewhat spoils the overall experience.
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