Less horror than expected

Rating: 6/10 (19 June 2013)

When I was a kid I used to play a game called The Incredible machine. Basically, you had to build what is called a Rube Goldberg machine, a device which carries out a simple task in an over-elaborate way. This is the way this movie works, the characters meet their ends in bizarre, creative and elaborate ways.
The plot pretty much follows the first part of the series. Criminal Minds-regular AJ Cook plays Kimberly Corman, who gets a premonition and saves a couple of people from certain death in the form of a huge highway pile-up. Of course it was their destiny to die and death will not be fooled.
Clear Rivers is kept from the first film, clearly for exposition purposes. She informs the main characters of basically what happened in the first movie, the death list and all. Her character is one of the more interesting in the movie. As is Tony Todd's undertaker character, and it is a waste that his part is so small.
I enjoyed the first movie because I felt the premise felt fresh, and though it had flaws it was pretty enjoyable. This movie is basically just more of the same. The horror elements are all but gone, the emphasis is instead placed on the impressive crash scene at the beginning and the elaborate deaths, which makes this more of a gore-action-comedy than a horror movie. The acting is also pretty bad, AJ Cook is decent enough but many other performances are way over-the-top.