I’m a sucker for the final girl trope in horror movies. Like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Which has the iconic final scene of Sally riding away in the truck, escaping Leatherface. All her friends might be dead but the final girl is alive and well.
That’s what partially drew me to Final Destination 2. That, and Pretty Much It made a video about watching the Final Destination Franchise and I recognized a familiar face. Michael Landes of Lois and Clark fame. (He was only in one season before he was recast but he will always be MY Jimmy Oleson).
The movie opens with Kimberly Corman (a young AJ Cook from Criminal Minds who I initially didn’t recognize) going on a trip to Daytona Beach with her friends. Although, driving down to Daytona Beach from New York seems like way to long of a drive to be worth it.
Kimberly says goodbye to her father, when her not-long-for-this-earth friends Shaina pulls out this very 00’s line.
“Can we go get the guys? I’m getting horny.”
A hilarious thing to say around your friends dad.
On the interstate entrance ramp, Kimberly gets a premonition. A log truck causes a massive pile up on the highway, featuring many explosions (of course you can never have to many explosions). During the lead up to the crash, it’s revealed to be the one year anniversary of the flight 180 crash.
The log truck lets off a chain reaction which also serves to introduce up to the main characters. A log crashes through State Trouper Thomas Burke’s windshield. Eugene Dix crashes his motorcycle. Rory flips his car and his killed when a semi hits him head on. Kat also flips her car on top of a log. A waterbottle gets stuck onder Nora and Tim don’t break in time and are killed via explosion. Evan is seemingly killed via explosion only to be trapped in his sports car when a Semi hits him head on. Which then races toward Kimberly and her friends.
Kimberly wakes up from the premonition understandably freaked out. Burke questions Kimberly when she blocks the on-ramp. As a car carrier speeds out of control toward them, Burke pulls Kimberly out of the way as the semi crashed into her SUV, killing her friends and saving the lives of everyone else on the ramp.
Kimberly realizes right away that her premonition is exactly the same one that Alex Browning had on flight 180. The other survivors are hesitant to believe her, until Even Lewis is impaled with a fire escape ladder. It’s too weird of a coincidence, everyone agrees to hear Kimberly out.
Final Destination 2 is a successful sequel because it knows exactly how to balance comedy and horror. However, in a movie with fantastic kills it’s the relationship between the two characters that interest me the most (sorry everyone I’m forever Tumblr brained).
Cook describes her character as: “As far as Kimberly goes, she’s a very strong girl, very determined because her mother died a year earlier, right in front of her eyes, so she’s had to grow up quick.”
For Thomas Burke, Landes says this about his character: “a real nice, decent guy who comes across this huge car accident [and] who is very intrigued to begin with” and as “the guy who bumps into the girl and he goes nuts as her protector.”
There’s something about this dynamic that I love. In an interview, Landes said in a previous draft there was more romance between Kimberly and Burke but that it was toned down and now it’s more of a ‘brother/sister thing.’
But come on. Kimberly and Burke have way to much chemistry. However Landes does say this: “So what they have now, hopefully, is a little bit of chemistry and you get the idea that through tragedy something good will come. So it ends in an optimistic way, that maybe they can be together but there’s no real love story.”
As a plus, Kimberly is mentioned in Final Destination Bloodlines as having survived. No mention of Burke thought.
It’s okay though, in my head they’re married.
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