David Farnor | On 21, May 2025

Director: David R Ellis
Cast: Ali Larter, AJ Cook, Michael Landes
Certificate: 15

If you’ve ever felt nervous driving near a truck on a motorway, you’ve seen Final Destination 2 – and the lingering impact of its opening car crash alone is an indicator of its success. The sequel to 2000’s unlikely franchise-starter took three years to arrive, with most of the creative team unavailable to return – although the script (by J Mackye Gruber and Eric Bress) is based on a story co-written by the original film’s creator Jeffrey Reddick. Final Destination 2 continues its killer premise – a bunch of people cheat death, only for death to catch up with them – and immediately sets about trying to do it bigger and better.

That’s apparent from the introduction, which sees Kimberly (AJ Cook, relatively fresh from a breakout role in The Virgin Suicides) have a premonition about a catastrophic pile-up on Route 23. She stalls her car and ends up blocking eight people from driving onto the road – only for the disaster to occur, killing off all her friends in her car. It’s a quease-inducing sequence filmed with a nail-biting attention to detail, and that approach defines David R Ellis’ direction: a second unit helmer in his sophomore turn at the helm, he ratchets up the suspense with precision, turning the first film’s creepy chain of misbehaving everyday objects into a Rube Goldberg machine of mortality.

There’s a dark wit to the film’s literal death traps, from deadly panes of glass to a pipe and some barbed wire in a field that lead to a terrifyingly fatal display of dismembering. It’s the smaller, mundane constructs that are the most chilling, as Ellis contrives elaborate but unsettlingly plausible set pieces involving an elevator and a waste disposal unit in a kitchen sink.

While these are the primary reason to tune in, the jumble of victims-in-waiting are just distinctive enough to make them relatively memorable. There’s arrogant lottery winner Evan (David Paetkau), mother-and-son Nora (Lynda Boyd) and Tim (James Kirk), stressed businesswoman Kat (Keegan Connor Tracy), stoner Rory Peters (Jonathan Cherry), suspicious mum-to-be Isabella (Justina Machado), unnerved teacher Eugene (TC Carson).

AJ Cook is believably spooked as Kimberly, who forms a loyal connection with earnest trooper Thomas (Michael Landes), but it’s the return of Ali Larter as Clear from Final Destination that’s the film’s best decision: after locking herself away in the wake of the first film’s events, she brings a layer of trauma to events that elevates the franchise beyond sheer gory thrills. Between Clear, Eugene’s rants about free will and predetermination, and Tony Todd’s always-unnerving charisma as mortician William Bludworth, the sequel builds upon the franchise’s lore to find new ways of cheating death, with a effective twist along the way. The result is a fun, thrilling expansion of the Final Destination formula, keeping things grounded enough while upping the carnage.

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