One year after the explosion of Flight 180, college student Kimberly Corman is heading to Daytona Beach, Florida, for spring break with her friends, Shaina McKlank, Dano Estevez, and Frankie Whitman.

She stalls her car on the entrance ramp, preventing several people from entering the highway, including lottery winner Evan Lewis, mother Nora Carpenter and her fifteen-year-old son Tim, businesswoman Kat Jennings, stoner Rory Peters, pregnant Isabella Hudson, high school teacher Eugene Dix, and state trooper Thomas Burke.

Aware of Death's presence, Kimberly seeks help from Clear Rivers, the last survivor of Flight 180 who committed herself to a psychiatric ward for protection after Alex Browning was killed by a falling brick.

Believing that the birth of Isabella's baby would disrupt Death's plan, Burke sends fellow marshal Steve Adams to take her into custody while he gathers the other survivors in his apartment.

Using the jaws of life, Kat's rescuer accidentally activates her airbag, causing her head to be impaled on a pipe protruding from her headrest.

Her cigarette falls onto a gasoline leak from a news van that explodes, launching a barbed wire fence into the air that dismembers Rory.

The first film, Final Destination, was conceived by writers Jeffrey Reddick, James Wong, and Glen Morgan from Flight 180, a spec script intended for use in The X-Files.

[7][8] The film's success inspired New Line Cinema then-President of Production Toby Emmerich to approach Reddick for a sequel, to which he responded positively.

[11][12][16] Rumors indicated that Sawa had a contract dispute with New Line concerning the deduction of his salary;[11][15] however, Perry resolved the issue with the statement that "it had everything to do with narrative, and nothing to do with money or Devon's unwillingness to come back.

[18] Cook described her role as "a very strong girl, very determined because her mother died a year earlier, right in front of her eyes, so she had to grow up quick."

"[14] The crew was enticed of Carson's casting, with Bress mentioning how his "originally envisioned Woody Allen-type of character has got ten more times life than it ever had.

Similarly, Perry was astonished by how Carson "can take the most absurd lines and deliver them in such grammatized form with his eyes and his deep rich speaking voice.

"[19][21] Rounding up the cast are Lynda Boyd (Rachel Todd in You, Me and the Kids) as widow Nora Carpenter and James Kirk (Kyle Morgan in Once Upon a Christmas) as her son Tim Carpenter, David Paetkau (Hunter Kerrigan in Just Deal) as gambler Evan Lewis, Justina Machado (Vanessa Diaz in Six Feet Under) as pregnant Isabella Hudson, and Noel Fisher (Todd Tolanski of X-Men: Evolution) as farmer Brian Gibbons.

[18] Novice actors Sarah Carter, Alejandro Rae, and Shaun Sipos were hired as Kimberly's friends Shaina McKlank, Dano Estevez, and Frankie Whitman correspondingly.

Senior technical director James Coulter added creative 3D tracking on shots with fast pans, motion blur, and filters such as dust, mist, slabs of bark, broken chains, and other debris.

Digital artist Edmund Kozin manipulated high resolution photos which were carefully stitched together to achieve realistic texture amongst the 22 CG logs of the film.

[27] Like its predecessor, no official album accompanied the motion picture; however, there are ten songs featured in the film itself and two music videos embedded in its subsequent home release.

[37] Final Destination 2 placed at #2 in the United States box office in its opening weekend, only $200,000 short behind the thriller film The Recruit, which debuted on the same day, starred Al Pacino and Colin Farrell, and cleared $16,302,063 domestically.

[34][35] The Terror Gauge, the third documentary, is a test screening system of the film in which viewers are subjected to biofeedback and neurological examination under neurophysiologist Dr. Victoria Ibric.

[45] In 2010, Nick Hyman of Metacritic included Final Destination 2 in the website's editorial 15 Movies the Critics Got Wrong, denoting that "the elaborate suspense/action set pieces from the first two films are more impressive than most".

[48] James Berardinelli of ReelViews stressed that "the movie mandates complete gullibility and vacuous attention in order to work on any level".

[50] Justine Elias of The Village Voice asserted that "this risible thriller is merely a sadistic series of misread premonitions and vile murders".

A. O. Scott of The New York Times imparted "it's not as cheekily knowing as the Scream movies or as trashily Grand Guignol as the Evil Dead franchise, but like those pictures it recognizes the close relationship between fright and laughter, and dispenses both with a free, unpretentious hand".

[58] Marc Savlov of Austin Chronicle admired how "it is surprisingly good fun for the current crop of horror films, reasonably well-plotted and full of jaw-dropping, white-knuckle scares.

[61] Amongst the cast ensemble, Carson, Cherry, Cook, Landes, Larter, and Todd were prominent amidst the analysis for their performances as Eugene, Rory, Kimberly, Thomas, Clear, and Bludworth respectively.

Koehler of Variety said that "Carson as skeptical Eugene energizes what had been a rote conception on the page"; "Cherry offered some dry comic balance"; Larter was "casted little light"; Todd was squandered by his "single, distinctly flat scene"; and "the generally awful thesping, led by Cook, whose blurry grasp of emotions betrays Ellis' apparent disinterest in his actors".

[52] Dustin Putman of TheMovieBoy.com commented how "Cook is serviceable as the premonition-fueled Kimberly, but doesn't evoke enough emotion in the scenes following the brutal deaths of her close friends.

"[62] Robin Clifford of Reeling Reviews stated that "Cook was strident as the catalyst that sparks events with her premonitions of disaster and her fervent desire to cheat the Reaper" whereas Larter was "giving the smart-ass edge her character needs",[63] while Brett Gallman of Oh, The Horror!

[6][67] The highway scene was regarded by Grove of Film Threat as "a monument to smashed cars, flying objects and scorched metal" and Garth Franklin of Dark Horizons as "utterly spectacular.

"[52][68] Anne Billson of Guardian.co.uk exclaimed it as "one of the most terrifying sequences I've ever seen, all the more effective for being grounded in reality; few drivers haven't felt that anxious twinge as the badly secured load on the lorry in front of them starts to wobble.