Final Destination 2 -- 2003 -- R

For a sequel, this one didn't do too bad. It had a lot of conventions of the genre in that it killed off whoever survived the original (except the token one, of course). It had the one surviving person who could bring everyone up to date from the first film with the "I was there" speech. It altered the rules somewhat, though did a fair job of explaining them. 

Complaint one is about the dialogue. Seriously, there are several lines that should never appear in a movie of any kind. When the character is talking and pauses briefly, there is not real reason to say "go on" except it being in the script. There was the "what do you mean" question when someone was explaining something weird. And of course, it wouldn't be a sequel with the "I can't believe this is happening again" line. Not just once, but three times!

There were a lot of contrivances to the plot, though it did what it could to explain them away, to its credit. Unlike the first one, the potential victims here were all strangers, meaning they had to trust each other in this outlandish theory. So they all got together to meet about it. Why? This is not answered. Nor is it explained HOW they managed to get everyone a special cell phone instead of just exchanging numbers. Again, there was some good explanation to get around some of this, but passing out the cell phones was just silly to me. 

What went right was changing up the rules. At the beginning, I had doubts since the rules as established in the original were that you will die in the order you were supposed to die in the original incident. Well, the last ones to die were the first to go, so I'm thinking there's a problem here since our girl survived and the was the last to die. That gets explained and it works for me. We're going in reverse order.

And now, the real redeeming quality. I hesitate to say much on this since it would this part of the film though it has no bearing on the actual plot. Here's the short version without details. Every survivor in this film would have died the previous year had the survivors in the original film died on the plane. They go into detail on this one, but that's some good storytelling.

So this is a rare sequel that measures up closely to the original probably because they worked to tie it in to the original, give us the elements of the original we liked, and move the story forward instead of placing it on a treadmill. Good stuff.

Got FD3 at home and looking forward to it...