Final Destination 2 - The Filthy Critic

This week:
Final Destination 2

Filthy says:
"A Good Stiff Hollywood Ass Scraping."

Final Destination 2 is just fucking awful.

I don't know what else you want me to say. It's not a mess and it's not incompetent. It's just so fucking lame, and such a lazy turd where all the effort went into the gruesome details and none went into plot, dialogue or acting. I could tell you about the script that is as much fun as getting a Dirty Sanchez from your grandfather. I could tell you about the nondescript cast that is even less interested in the proceedings than the audience. I could blather on about the almost complete lack of boobies (there are two briefly).

I could do all that, and Godammit, I'm going to. Why? Because I paid $6.50 for the Friday matinee. Venting is the only way I know to get my money's worth without having to leave my apartment--where I am downloading pirated porn before the government makes it even more illegal-- and go back to the Olde Town Arvada Colorado Cinema and talk to some pimply teenager who wears the "Manager" name tag this week.

Fuck you, New Line, for the rickety split of bamboo you just rammed through my shins. How many people work at your company since Time-Warner downsized you after being screwed by AOL? Maybe it's down to two or three retards in the mailroom that they couldn't fire because of discrimination charges, but even a few braindead ninnies can smell shit when it's sticking to their shoe. They wipe it off on their hands, not on the megaplex screen. This turd should have been sent directly to Blockbuster, and set in a flaming bag outside the door.

I didnít see the first Final Destination movie, but that isn't necessary in order to be completely ripped off by the sequel. It uses the exact same plot: some kid has a premonition of death and alters his or her travel plans. In the first, the kid gets off a plane that then explodes. In the second, a girl foresees her death in a traffic accident and blocks an onramp, saving dozens of lives. In both cases, death apparently feels as cheated as paying audiences and wants to exact a bloody revenge. A lot of subpar actors run around trying to figure out how to survive. They never asked us if we wanted them to, and that's pretty fucking rude.

It's warm, stinging shit, through and through. But as anyone who has ever crapped before knows, some chunks are nastier than others. The main problem is that the movie tries about as hard to make sense as Candy Bottoms' porn interpretation of James Joyce's "Ulysses". At least that had an awesome double-penetration daisy chain and a profound subtext about what a single life means. There's no hot action here, though, and no Leopold Bloom to understand. Final Destination 2 is just a string of bloody deaths tied together with the most ridiculous plot devices and whiny people. By the way, in Candy Bottoms' Ulysses Uncut and Nasty, she does Bloom's wife's famous speech much more passionately than I could have imagined. She really seems to mean each "Yessss!" And the movie was faithful enough to the book that I got a B+ on my book report, with only a few points taken off because I guess the book's masturbation scene isn't as hot as the movie's.

Final Destination 2's deaths are supposed to be creative. There's a man impaled by a falling fire escape ladder, and another guy sliced into pieces by flying barbed wire. On at least three occasions, someone's gas tank erupts in a "ChiPs" caliber explosion. That last one just kept getting more and more creative each time they used it.

It's really fucking hard to be impressed by the creativity, though, when the the characters don't act like human beings; they're cogs in a huge lazy scriptwriter's wheel. They do asinine things just so they can get blowed up real good. A perfect example is that when A.J. Cook blocks an onramp to keep other cars off the freeway, the cop who shows up gets her out of the car but doesn't even bother clearing the road. Stupid shit, dumb actions dictated by lazy screenwriters, litter the script like condoms in the parking lot of the Turkish Bath on Colfax.

How we're celebrating Valentine's Day here in Arvada: The Senior Swinger's will be loving children.All day. Maybe giving them candy, too.

And while the characters keep proving how stupid they are, they also occasionally blurt out knowledge that could not possibly be deduced in any way other than a screenwriter's last-minute necessity. Cook plays the girl with premonitions, and she sees things with varying clarity, depending on what the story requires. She and Ali Larter (from the first movie) pull a trick for cheating Death out of their dull asses. See, the Grim Reaper is killing people in the order they would have died if things had gone according to plan. And somehow, the two girls deduce that if a new life is created, it will disrupt the pattern. How they figured this out is a complete mystery. But we're stupid, says Hollywood, so we should shut up and accept it. They race around trying to find a pregnant woman from the accident and make sure she has her baby before Death gets her.

She does. Oh, except now Cook sees that she wouldn't have died in the accident after all. Fuck you, Hollywood. That's the laziest reversal in the history of movies. Is that really the best you could come up with? Ad then, what happened to that plot line? The chain is ultimately broken without a new life, just more stupid stunts. Oh, and all of this takes place exactly one year after the original Final Destination, although that is irrelevant.

One funny note is that Cook's premonitions are always incorrect, and rather than them coming true, she causes the deaths by interfering. That is a really funny idea, but not an intentional one. The movie is so Goddamn slipshod that the writers and director never even notice.

Death himself seems to be as stupid as the kids. It apparently has the capability to close doors and air vents and move tables, but it can't just kill the people. Christ, I wished it would have killed me, or at the very least, the asshole two rows ahead whose one-year old cried throughout the movie. Oh, but what a wonderful mother. When someone complained to her about the crying, she politely moved a couple more rows forward where we could still hear it. For fuck's sake, you wouldn't want to deprive the child of the chance to see people get blown up every five minutes.

The movie also looks like it was shot cheap. It has a polyester sheen, like they used the cheapest materials available. The cast is the best example. They are to a man bland, lousy and unrecognizable. The sets are generic and seemingly only extend to the edge of the camera's frame. It's the kind of movie where you expect to see a boom mike danglng in a shot. Another tipoff to the cheapness is how the movie has replaced the first one's costly plane explosion with a tacky car crash and lots of cheap fireballs. Gas tanks, diesel tanks and oxygen all blow up like Hiroshima whenever the going gets a little dull.

Of course, it's all we deserve, right? After all, who the fuck expected a sequel to Final Destination to be any good? Hollywood has every to make shit and if we go to see it we have no right to complain. Fuck 'em. They'll get theirs. One Finger.

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