Final Destination 2: Critic Reviews

Opens with a horrific traffic accident, which seems apt since what follows is the cinematic equivalent of rubbernecking.

Once you get past its supremely nonsensical title, Final Destination 2, a smooth and sharp slice of teen-gothic cheese, is kind of fun.

That there is an audience for a movie in which innocent people suffer hideous accidental deaths is troubling enough, but that a group of creative people chose to direct their energies on this repulsive spectacle simply provokes disgust.

Part of the fun here is anticipating the Rube Goldberg-style machinations by which Death catches up with its targets.

It contains some of the most brain-dead people a screenplay has ever produced.

It's hard to root for a heroine ... who wails, 'It's a sign! Nora and Tim are going to be attacked by pigeons!'

It has a sense of humor ... but in the end is overwhelmed by its silliness.

Takes a good idea from the first film and pounds it into the ground, not to mention decapitating, electrocuting, skewering, blowing up, incinerating, drowning and gassing it.

FD2, despite some imaginative fatalities, is less a movie than a slick video game.

Suffers from the same rancid dialogue and acting problems as the original but with a much funnier pulse.

Though the complicated carnage is competently filmed and staged, the acting and the dialogue are often risible enough to make you wonder if the film isn't a spoof brought you by the folks from Scary Movie.

It's a soulless affair that has little of the panache and intelligence of 2000's Final Destination.

The filmmakers clearly set out to make a film that featured lots of footage of really disgusting annihilations, then threw together a haphazard script and hired a few hot actors to play the corpses.

Final Destination 2 doesn't pretend to be anything other than a robotic repeat of the first film.

The movie mandates complete gullibility and vacuous attention in order to work on any level.

A gory good show for fans of R-rated horror mayhem.

The movie is a real jolter for horror fans who like the charge of gory images but also demand a certain level of intelligence in the proceedings.

Gruesome, ridiculous, really bad waste of time.

Now that the ground rules have been established for the Final Destination movies, the fun lies in seeing the inventive ways in which the writers dispatch the various characters in the sequel.