BEFORE: It's very sneaky, they made a bunch of movies out of a common fear that nearly everyone shares, the fear of dying. The movies play out like horror movies, but it's the horror of knowing that we're all mortal and at some point, our bodies are going to fail us, even if that failure is caused by an outside circumstance, it's still the fault in ourselves, not in the stars. Umm, or is it? Is Death caused by a feeling, thinking, outside force or is it just caused by accidents, disease and/or stupidity or recklessness? Discuss.
The "killer" is stalking these people, but the killer is also unseen, there's no person wearing a mask or holding a chainsaw or a gun or anything, they don't even feel the need to SHOW some character like Boogie or the Grim Reaper, because the presence is all implied. Those knives didn't just drop off the counter randomly, Death did it. The car doors didn't just stop opening when the car got stuck on the train tracks, Death did it. Allegedly. Your spouse didn't replace your parachute with a fitted bedsheet, Death did it. Sure, if that makes it easier for you.
Ali Larter carries over from "Final Destination", which itself is a bit of a spoiler, but one other actor carries over as well, he's going to dominate this last week-and-a-half of my October horror chain. For my purposes, I'm going to file these movies under "body horror" because that's really what we're talking about, that we all walk around in this fragile bag of blood and organs that's way too vulnerable to heat, cold, projectiles, punctures, fatigue and just plain old wear-and-tear, so that clock is ticking for all of us - it's just a matter of time, isn't it?
THE PLOT: Death is stalking Kimberly Corman and multiple survivors of a deadly highway accident.
AFTER: So there's a bit of a pattern here, every sequel maybe has one or two people who carry over from the last film, despite most of the characters being killed off in very unlikely and darn near ridiculous ways. With a little more comedy, this could have been called "Darwin Awards 2" maybe. But somebody needs to carry over, if for no other reason than to remember what happened to the people who got kicked off Flight 180, and then maybe it won't take so long for the next group of people to realize that Death is stalking them because they SHOULD have died.
So, umm, if Death is real does that mean it's the Angel of Death, and therefore angels are real and therefore God is real? And if God is real, does God have a plan in place for all of us or not, and if he has a plan for us, isn't death part of that plan? And if we mess with the plan or we change the plan, doesn't that make God fallible, and thus a little less god-like? Am I way over-thinking this or have I just found a plothole that nobody has thought of before? While I'm at it, are our fates already determined for us, or can we change them? This film would suggest that we CAN change our fates, provided we never leave the house and never go swimming with sharks or driving fast in a car or prepare a meal using sharp knives, we should be OK, and we'll live as long as we can but then die anyway from disease or old age or just plain boredom. Wow, you really can NOT win at the Game of Life, can you?
While I'm at it, if there is a force that is somehow the personification of "Death" that is stalking the people who were supposed to have died, what is the force that is giving the premonitions to the people before-hand, who now have the power to save lives - a few, anyway? Will the franchise be explaining this opposite force at any point, or am I just going to be left hanging here? Is this God or some more minor deity that is granting certain people the power of foresight or are they just born with this talent, it's some human skill built in to the brain that doesn't work until it needs to? I mean, we all have dream software that's hard-wired in, or perhaps our brains just need to process old information while the body rests, I'm not 100% sure that's what dreams are, but that's what we've been told over the years, right? If the brain switched off while we slept, then we'd be dead, that brain needs to keep working all the time I think, or we'd be comatose and never wake up. Right? So maybe the premonition power is an extension of our brain's ability to dream, that's a bit unclear though.
I haven't talked much about my mother, since she passed away in May at least, on the last trip we made to North Carolina. She'd had heart trouble for years, and she'd get fluid build-up in her lungs, so maybe in her last five years she'd be in the hospital every six months or so, and then spend a few months in rehab before getting to go home - and her dementia was getting progressively worse for maybe the last three years, she could remember family trips from years ago but she had no memories of living in a nursing home for two years, or the trip down to live in my sister's house. So I never officially said goodbye, but with each trip to visit her there was maybe more of a feeling that it might be the last time I'd see her. Last October she was talking about needing to get back to her mother's house in time for dinner, and I had to remind her that her mother passed away years ago and hadn't owned that house for some time before that.
On our last visit in May, she was mostly unresponsive, mumbling a lot and clearly in some kind of pain, then on our third night there I was up late (as usual) watching TV (of course) and my phone rang, my sister was calling. Not texting, calling - well I knew before answering that my mother was gone, that's not really a premonition, it was just reading the room. Some things you just don't put in a text. Of course I had dreams about her after, and maybe I might have had a dream about her dying before that trip, but I don't think you could count that as a premonition either, because it was fairly certain that it would happen at some point, the doctors had given her a prognosis of WEEKS at that point, instead of months. I'm just grateful I was in the same zip code when it happened, and not back in New York, my family could go directly into the memorial planning phase.
These "Final Destination" films don't seem to ever get into the funeral phase, I mean there was a mass funeral for the students and teachers killed on Flight 180, but after that, things happened so quickly there just wasn't any time. Same goes for the sequel, we don't see a funeral for the people who died in the highway crash because they're just NPCs, the focus is on the people who did NOT get on the highway, because Kimberly had a premonition of the whole accident, in which she and her friends would all die, plus Officer Burke, plus a dozen or so other people, all in very gruesome and horrible ways. Like screaming AND on fire. Who the hell lets a truck hauling giant logs on the same highway as passenger cars, anyway? I mean, was Death so busy trying to manage the hundreds of thousands of people who die every day that he had to start killing them off in bunches? Does he have a quota or something, maybe 50 people have to die on Long Island every day and he finds that it's much more efficient to sabotage a lumber truck than to come up with 50 separate accidents, one for each person.
Well, this is where the logic of the franchise's premise really starts to break down, because we're back where we started, aren't we? If Death has a plan that means that there IS some form of order to the universe, people are born, they live X number of years and then, well, they've just got to go, so dropping giant logs on to the highway and causing fiery crashes, mayhem and bloodshed is part of the natural order. But then one person subverted that order, and used her car to block the on-ramp, thereby saving the lives of a few dozen people, but we really only need to focus on 8 or 9 of them. There were also Kimberly's three friends in her car, but they died in a SEPARATE crash a few minutes after the first one, again it's like a punchline to a sick joke. Oh, my friends are alive! No, wait, they're dead too.
The police officer pulls Kimberly out of the way of the second crash, so he's also interfered with Death's plan. The sequel then reverts to the plot of the first film, where Death now wants to track down those 8 or 9 people who should have died in the accident and take them out, one-by-one. And one of them JUST won the lottery, too - wait, that's kind of like that Alanis Morrissette song, right? Evan Lewis, lottery winner, has one of those weird chain reaction kitchen-based deaths, where he accidentally starts a grease fire and also accidentally microwaves something metal just BEFORE he gets his hand stuck in the drain trying to retrieve a piece of jewelry. Oh, sure, he could just take his diamond watch OFF, but why would he do that? Instead he has to watch helplessly as the grease fire spreads through the whole kitchen, and by the time he gets his hand loose, it's too late to put it out, plus the fire extinguisher malfunctions, so he's forced to flee, only his windows JUST slammed shut and locked, so he has to break the glass. Anyway, he goes down the fire escape as his kitchen explodes, so he's safe - no, wait, the ladder on the fire escape is stuck, until it isn't. So much drama (and comedy) over one death, it ends up feeling like you're watching Buster Keaton in a snuff film.
Next to go is Tim Carpenter, he and his mother survived the highway crash because Kimberly blocked the on-ramp. He's got a dentist appointment and what could possibly go wrong there? Sharp tools, drills, tanks of high-pressure anesthetic gas, it's a minefield really. Also there are pigeons who keep crashing into the dentist office windows and dying, and still Tim manages to die in a very ridiculous way that's semi-connected to all of these random things.
At this point Kimberly decides to visit Clear Rivers, the fakely named person who survived the first film, but only because she checked herself into a mental hospital and she hasn't left since. It's a rational choice, as long as she's locked up in a padded room then Death can't get to her, and she's got one of those crazy-person vision boards about the accidents that took place one year before, pushpins connected with red yarn, which is the preferred choice of crazy people trying to prove conspiracies, for sure. Clear's advice is that Death might not be killing people in the correct order any more, but he's still going to kill everyone, eventually. I mean, she's not wrong, it may take 10 or 20 or 50 years, but Death's going to get to you eventually. Death thanks you for your patience, and someone will be with you shortly to kill you.
Eventually Clear does leave the looney bin and she takes Kimberly to see the mortician (from the first film) who tells them that "only new life can defeat Death". Umm, great, what does THAT mean? It leads them to remember the pregnant woman who was in the traffic that avoided the crash, however nobody's been in touch with her, she hasn't come to any of the survivor group meetings. Somehow they determine that the birth of her baby will create a loophole that will ruin Death's design. How? Not sure, but I think they're desperate enough to try anything at this point.
Ugh, NITPICK POINTS abound after Officer Burke tries to find the pregnant lady with the white van seen in the footage from the day of the crash. He SHOULD be able to just look up her information based on her license plate, and he does, but he also puts out an APB on her, which is not correct procedure. The woman is arrested and held in custody, but also she is very pregnant and needs to get to the hospital, so the whole thing devolves into a giant car chase, err, van chase, and meanwhile Kimberly has another premonition of somebody driving into a lake and drowning. Does the pregnant lady drive into the lake? Does somebody else? Who is this doctor in the vision, is she a helpful doctor or is she trying to kill the baby? Everybody ends up on the same farm, where some more people are horribly injured, and for some reason I got vibes from "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" here.
By the end, nobody has driven a van into a lake, so a desperate Kimberly decides to do it herself. This is not only dumb and foolhardy, but it subverts the entire formula that the film started with, the whole idea was that somebody gets shown a vision in order to PREVENT that thing from happening, and then suddenly the rules are different and Kimberly decides that the vision is there to show her what SHOULD happen, that's cuckoo bananas in addition to being incredibly inconsistent. I mean, if you really think that's going to hide you from Death, sure, go ahead, knock yourself out, drive a van into a lake, but I want nothing to do with it.
We're left with a complete distillation of the rules that we started with - we're left with just one rule, and that is that everybody dies. And if somebody SAVES somebody from dying, well, that just means they've got a target on their back now, and their death is going to happen ASAP, and it will be as horrible and/or ironic as possible. Now does that warrant another sequel? Yes, apparently so. Hollywood never met a premise that it couldn't beat right into the ground.
And with that, I'm on vacation - back in a week.
Directed by David R. Ellis (director of "Cellular" and "Snakes on a Plane")
Also starring A.J. Cook, Michael Landes, David Paetkau, James Kirk, Lynda Boyd, Keegan Connor Tracy, Jonathan Cherry, T.C. Carson, Justina Machado, Tony Todd (also carrying over from "Final Destination"), Sarah Carter, Alejandro Rae, Shaun Sipos, Andrew Airlie, Christina Jastrzembska, Eileen Pedde, Jill Krop, Marrett Green, Don Bell, Odessa Munroe, Noel Fisher, Benita Ha, Aaron Douglas, Eric Keenleyside, Enid-Raye Adams, Fred Henderson, Veena Sood, Darcy Laurie, John R. Taylor, Alfred E. Humphreys, Chilton Crane, Klodyne Rodney, Michael S. Bolton
RATING: 4 out of 10 hook hands in a box
