A horribly rushed, pointless cash-in.

Rating: 3/10 (30 October 2005)

'Oh yes, there will be blood,' Jigsaw promises.
Well about a tea-cup's worth if you're lucky. 'There will be boredom' or "There will be headaches" would be more appropriate tagline for this absolutely worthless, mess of a sequel. After the surprisingly great and successful original, Lionsgate immediately green-lit this movie for production and completion within less than a year. Exactly how good can a film be with such a short production schedule? The answer is not very good at all. In fact it's downright awful.
Jigsaw has returned to teach ironic lessons to those who live dull lives yet are not truly alive. Only this time he attracts the attention of a half-crazed cop (oh wait, he did that last time as well) who is so thoroughly incompetent at his job that you'll want to jump into the movie and throttle him. Jigsaw has locked a bunch of strangers in a spooky old house with nerve gas slowly killing them. He gives them loads of clues on how to escape but since they are all idiots, none of them work together and their utter stupidity only serves to force the lumbering plot along and lead to their well deserved deaths.
It's not just the bad script that kills the film, after all great filmmakers can make brilliance out of a rotten screenplay. It's the very poor editing, urine-soaked cinematography, incoherent pacing, and dumb characters that cripple the film beyond repair. First-time director Darren Lynn Bousman isn't exactly Uwe Boll, but his lack of experience behind the camera gives this entire film an amateurish, hack feel.
Wahlberg's clichéd stereotype Detective is right out of a bad, 80s, bottom shelf Cop video and the people stuck in the poisonous house are just morons. The first Saw worked so well because we only had 2 victims who conversed and worked with/against each other for the whole film. We had a stronger attachment to them. And they looked for logical ways out before resorting to the painful. This time we get loads more victims with little explanation on who they are or what importance they have and they just never use their common sense.
Another thing that bogs this sequel down even more is its total reliance on condescending to the audience. Any average movie goer could figure the best way out of most of the booby-traps and death scenarios but these stupid characters just do the dumbest things so they can get killed and so film offers up another corpse for us to scream at. But not even this works. Some guy climbs into a big oven (only a retard would do this in a horror film) and is burned alive. But we don't even see anything! And when he tries to pull himself out, not only is he not even burnt, but he just dies for no apparent reason. So his feet got burnt a bit, big deal! If their were no swearing in this film, it would be a PG-13 all the way. Don't expect any of the bone-chilling scares you got first time around.
The only thing that stops Saw II from being a complete failure is the interesting, if incredibly stupid, plot twist. But is it worth suffering 90 minutes for? I would only recommend this film if you expect it to be crap, have lowered your expectations extremely far and obviously if you have the time and money to waste on it.
Overall this is a disgrace to the original. Oh and said Saw only appears for about a second and half.