Way to go, humanity.

Rating: Null/10 (14 February 2003)

In the time of Ancient Rome, one could pay a small amount to sit in a coliseum, enjoy a loaf of bread, and watch a human body be ripped apart by a pair of jungle beasts. After seeing Final Destination Two, I can only conclude that the level of entertainment has actually declined since then.
Director David R. Ellis took over where James Wong, who also directed The One, left off with the sequel to the 2000 film Final Destination. The film centers around the same idea as the first; a teen sees the future, saving the lives of several people, and p***ing the hell out of Death, so Death goes out of its way to claim those who had been saved, as it was their time to go. The teen, Kimberly Corman (A.J. Cook) has a vision of a tremendous and wholly unrealistic two-dozen-car pile-up, caused by falling logs. The premonition comes to her on the one-year memorial of the plane crash of the Final Destination, so it is the one-year memorial of teen premonitions. The survivors of the crash don't believe there is any connection between themselves and the people who started mysteriously dying after they were saved by a forewarning, until, of course, they start dying. Kimberly then goes to Clear Rivers (Ali Larter), the sole survivor of Final Destination, and tries to figure out how to cheat and beat death. Though the title `Final Destination 2' is rather oxymoronic, if not just moronic, the film was made to tie the loose ends of it's predecessor. The only question I begged to have answered was, `Why?'
If there was somehow a way for one to act one's self out of a paper bag, everyone in the cast would've had to spend eternity with someone's lunch. Somehow they were just unable to handle their jobs of screaming and burying their faces into the person next to them at the sight of someone being crushed by a large glass pain or cut into three pieces by a barbed-wire fence. I have not seen acting this poor since Queen of the Damned, in which actors went in and out of random lisps and accents as if they knew no one was going to see the film anyway. The dialogue was exceedingly inane, and it could strongly be felt that writers Jeffrey Reddick, who worked on the original, and J. Mackye Gruber really tried hard to work the word `premonition' into lines, as it had covered all of the commercials. The writers also tried to work in post-death jokes, as if to lighten the film up for the sub-human audience, reminiscent of the jokes in the film Stir of Echoes, used to break the tension. The only difference being, of course, the jokes weren't funny.
The visual effects, meant for horror purposes, were both wildly comedic and painfully nauseating. Deaths that could've been alluded to by leaving the camera in the dying character's point of vision, were shown in all their mindlessness, complete with sound effects, much more disgusting than Alfred Hitchcock's stabbing of a watermelon for the film Psycho, and ruby blood droplets flying high into the air from the improbable ends of characters. Even the car pile-up was designed for blood-hungry viewers, with cars flipping into the air, completely defying the laws of physics, instead of making an attempt to stop at the sight of the blatant pile-up, and two shots of a man screaming while he burns to death, one from a distance and then a close-up. I will give some credit to Ellis, though, as in one scene, when four of the characters were killed in a field, one did get the feeling that Death was rubbing them out. However, the death sequence started out with a woman being impaled by a white tube, so the credit given is miniscule.

This film astounded me. I had no idea movies were made so poorly. And it's the number 5 movie at the box office this week. Way to go, humanity.