from Film Forum, 02/06/03Final Destination wasn't final enough
Final Destination 2 (New Line Cinema) is earning derision and dismay from critics. Director David R. Ellis serves up more of the same in this sequel: gory deaths and a story that depends on outrageous superstitions.
A critic at Movieguide makes the rather alarming claim that "Final Destination 2 … contains an allegorical Christian worldview." But the reviewer goes on to admit that the film's harsher elements exist "simply to titillate the beastly bloodlust of its intended teenage and young adult audience."
Loren Eaton (Focus on the Family) writes that the film's ideas are far from Christian insight: "Whereas Signs posits an exhaustive providence that actively works all things … to good, Final Destination 2 features a malicious sovereignty that manipulates events so that its subjects will die in the most painful, terrifying and messy ways possible. Those extreme portrayals, plus rampant vulgarity, nudity, and spiritual counterfeits murder this movie."
Bob Nusser (Preview) says the flick "picks up where Final Destination left off, and the gruesome, graphic violence continues with impalings, decapitations and the like." Gerri Pare (Catholic News Service) is equally disgusted: "The characters in the story only exist to be mutilated into nonexistence. There is not so much suspense as there is a bored sense of dread: OK, who's next?"
Mainstream critics were similarly unimpressed, even those who occasionally enjoy a "good bad movie." Bruce Fetts (Entertainment Weekly) says, "The only pleasure to be derived from the resulting carnage comes from the Rube Goldbergesque chain reactions that precede each fatality. Sadly, everything else about the film is also deadly."
