Final Destination 2

When a premonition saves her and several others from death in a fiery highway pile-up, a teenager (A.J. Cook) finds that she has disrupted death’s plans and that all those she saved must die. The sequel repeats exactly the far-fetched plot of the original, complete with elaborate chain-reaction deaths visited on the hapless characters and equally elaborate mumbo jumbo about the fabric of death’s continuum to try to keep the suspense up. There’s something repugnant about the sadistic glee with which these suckers are bumped off one by one; if they were anything but stick figures, it might even be vaguely obscene. The film was written by J. Mackye Gruber, Eric Bress and Jeffrey Reddick and was directed by David Richard Ellis—all without distinction but with an eye for the simple demands of their target teen audience. J.L.