After five Final Destination movies, it’s a little hard to tell them apart; they’re best described (and distinguished) by listing off the particular chapter’s gruesomely imaginative death scenes — which, let’s face it, are the reasons why we actually have five of these things (and counting). For the record, Final Destination 2 is the one that opens with an admittedly spectacular multi-vehicle freeway accident (on Route 23, no less, which is a little more subtle than if it had been on, say, Route 666 or something); from there, a recent lotto winner gets impaled through the eye with the ladder of a fire escape (after listening to a bunch of answering machine messages from girls who now want to have sex with him because he’s rich); a woman is decapitated by malfunctioning elevator doors; a dude blows up in a freak grilling accident; and, in the film’s show-stopper sequence, some poor bastard gets sliced into multiple pieces by a runaway barbed wire fence. And that’s not the half of it! Tony Todd is back at Bludworth the mortician, adding a postscript to the already ridiculous mythology of the first film (in this, you can foil Death’s plan by introducing a new life, which means everyone has to protect the pregnant woman at all costs); meanwhile, Ali Larter is a good sport for reprising her role as Clear Rivers, the only survivor of the first film and now locked away in the loony bin. Don’t look for any of the existential contemplation of the original film — this is a grand guignol freak show of gore galore all the way, and a damn good one, at that.
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New On Netflix: Final Destination 2