Tracy is a prominent antagonist and a major catalyst in the prank to humiliate Rachel. She dies extremely anticlimactically when a piece of debris falls on her.
Rachel herself dies quite suddenly likewise with falling debris.
Base-Breaking Character: Sue, as the only character returning from the first film. One half of the viewers feel she's pointless and is only there to make a link to the original Carrie - especially as she's suddenly killed off before she's able to affect the plot in any way. The other half likes getting to see how the trauma from the Black Prom has affected her, and her subplot of trying to atone for setting Carrie up for humiliation just adds to the narrative. Bonus points for being played by the same actress.
The scene where Lisa kills herself, already meant to be tragic, became even worse after the Phoebe Prince incident and other teen suicides.
Rachel being sexually humiliated at the party can feel eerily similar to the cases of Audrie Pott and Rehtaeh Parsons, both of whom took their own lives as a result of similar bullying.
Eric, as well as the rest of the football team, get away with humiliating and ultimately causing Lisa's death because of their "bright futures" with football, with his father defending his actions. Take out the suicide and change the sport to swimming, and you have the story of Brock Turner. That said, given that the villains were already Ripped from the Headlines even at the time the film was made, another incident like it happening was, regrettably, to be expected.
The movie in general is a teen horror film about a sympathetic goth teenager who goes on a vengeful killing spree against her classmates, who are portrayed almost universally as Asshole Victims who have it coming. It was released less than six weeks before the Columbine massacre. One of the bad guys, Eric, even shares his name with one of the Columbine killers, and the villains' ringleader Mark is played by one Dylan Bruno, who shares his first name with the other killer. The movie review site 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting summed it up:
"I point this out not to draw some spurious connection between the two events, but to emphasize how narrowly The Rage escaped going straight into a vault, never to be seen by the public. In March of '99, Carrie 2 was merely a morally confused teenage revenge fantasy, something screenwriter Raphael Moreu could have extracted from the brain of virtually any adolescent malcontent in America. A month later, however, it looked disturbingly like an apologia for Harris and Klebold's killing spree — and frankly, it still does."
Zachery Ty Bryan as a sexist, abusive jock became a little too fitting considering his multiple run-ins with the law for allegedly abusing women later in life.
Rachel's friend is called a Coyote Ugly date. The actress playing her, Mena Suvari, is not only a model, but played a popular character in American Beauty the exact same year. It's possible this is the Intended Audience Reaction - as Eric seems to actually like Lisa and looks surprised when Mark disses her - all to show the ridiculousness of the game.
Rachel herself straddles the line; while Emily Bergl is quite cute, she's not conventionally so, and her Goth sense of style would serve to alienate her from the popular crowd. The only character to diss her looks is Tracy, and she's a jealous Alpha Bitch.
Rachel is rather well adjusted when you consider the sheer amount of awfulness she has to put up with; her mother was mentally ill and had to be sectioned when she was just a child, she has neglectful and occasionally physically abusive foster parents, she's an outcast at school and her best friend kills herself! Not to mention she gets tormented by Jerk Jocks. And you'll find that, despite being in serious need of a hug, she's not likely to complain.
Sue as well. It's revealed that after the Black Prom, she had to spend some time in a mental hospital (in the book, while she grieved for a while and suffered from the gossip surrounding the incident, she wrote a book that gave herself some form of closure - and seemed to be moving on). While she never openly angsts, she clearly carries the guilt and trauma twenty years later.
Just Here for Godzilla: Much like with the original Carrie movie, a lot of people only watch for the psychic massacre climax.
The haircuts, fashions and music make this a 90s time capsule - which can make it unintentionally hilarious, but still quite nostalgic for those wanting to revisit the period.
Debra's death in the massacre; death by flying CDs to the throat. Bloody Hilarious and kind of awesome too.
The black and white shots the movie uses whenever Rachel's powers activate. While more akin to a 90s grunge music video, they are rather fitting.
Sequelitis: If you ignore the fact that it's a sequel, it's a great midnight movie, being filled with heaping helpings of extreme violence and late '90s, WB-teen-horrorcheese. But as a follow-up to a classic, it's a failure.
So Okay, It's Average: While trashed by critics and audiences when it first came out, it's seen as this nowadays. While it fails to live up to the original Carrie and has some Narm and questionable story beats - there is a lot more to it. Most fans of it say that if it wasn't billed as a sequel, its reception might have been a little better.
Bad CGI, bad CGI everywhere! While it may be justified due to it being made in the late '90s, it still doesn't account for the fact that all the CGI appears to come from Photoshop.
In the opening, a mechanism is visible behind the door to make it slam shut when Rachel is using her powers.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Sue. Not only does her investigation of Rachel's origins have little to do with the rest of the film, she gets unceremoniously killed off as soon as she reaches the action during the climax. Knowing that the film was a Dolled-Up Installment, it's clear that she was shoehorned in during rewrites in order to connect the film to the original.
Unintentional Period Piece: Leaving aside it being a Ripped from the Headlines story inspired by the 1993 Spur Posse, the fashions, hairstyles and alt-rock soundtrack make this a Gen-X time capsule. One plot point is Lisa taking a picture of Eric with a disposable camera that has to be developed by Rachel. There's a complete lack of cellphones among the teens, which would most certainly be used for the climactic party prank if the movie had been made a decade later. The prank also requires a video cassette tape, and Deborah meets her end by getting a pile of CDs thrown at her.
Rachel gets a moment where she pretends to be a lesbian to turn down Mark's advances. The words she specifically uses are "I'm a dyke". On the other hand, Mark later saying that Jesse gets more points for 'curing' her is presented as a Kick the Dog moment.
As noted above under Harsher in Hindsight, stories about teenage outcasts murdering their bullies are not handled nearly so lightly, nor with nearly as much sympathy for the killer, as they were in 1999. On the other hand...
Values Resonance: It's a horror film about a cultural obsession with sex, and toxic forms of masculinity, made in 1998. Such things were often joked about at the time and frequently dismissed with "boys will be boys", but by the '10s, they had become hot-button issues and major subjects of national debate. Drew Dietsch, writing for Bloody-Disgusting, even called it "a #TimesUp horror movie" that was ahead of its time.
By the end, Rachel's biological mother, believe it or not. She suffers from mental illness that led to her being put in an institution. Well over a decade later, she still doesn't seem to have recovered. Then she's broken out and hopes to reunite with her daughter...and then gets a front row seat to seeing said daughter massacre an entire house of people. She's terrified and leaves Rachel to burn in the fire.
Poor Lisa! A sweet young girl with her whole life ahead of her, and Rachel's best friend. She seemed to genuinely like Eric and thought they'd be happy together. Then she gets dumped and humiliated for the sake of a game - and jumps off the school roof.
Jesse. Out of everyone on the football team he's the only one who genuinely cares for Rachel. Not to mention that his girlfriend Tracy is a jerk to him. Then he loses Rachel (who he truly loved) before she almost tried to kill him, his arm is burnt and you can tell by the final that he still misses her.
incident and other teen suicides.
summed it up: