Better than the original in my opinion.

Rating: 7/10 (27 October 2008)

Saw II starts as detective Eric Matthews (Donnie Wahlberg) is called out to a grisly homicide scene by his ex-partner Kerry (Dina Meyer) who is now working full time on finding the notorious serial killer Jigsaw (Tobin Bell), at the crime scene detective Matthews sees that Jigsaw has left him a message. After managing to track Jigsaw down to a warehouse the cops think that his reign of terror is over but Jigsaw still has one last sadistic game to play as he has placed eight total strangers in a secured house that is slowly filling with poisonous gas which will kill them all within two hours, that is unless they can work together to solve Jigsaw's often fatal & always very painful puzzles & clues which will lead to both their freedom & the antidote for the poison. Things turn personal for the cops & detective Matthews in particular when Jigsaw reveals his teenage son Daniel (Erik Knudsen) is one of the eight...
The first sequel to the surprise horror thriller hit Saw (2004) which was apparently rushed into production to capitalise on the original films huge success Saw II was co-written & directed by Darren Lynn Bousman based on a script he had written which was originally called 'The Deperate' which went unmade for years until enterprising producers though of turning it into the next Saw film with the writer of the original Saw Leigh Whannell brought on board to turn it into a 'proper' Saw film. Like most good sequels Saw II takes what made the original work & expand on it making it more of a spectacle & more elaborate on a grander scale, to be honest I actually didn't like the original Saw as much as some did & I have to say in my opinion I think Saw II is a significant improvement on it. The first Saw had just two people trapped in a solitary room while true to expectation Saw II sees eight people trapped in an entire house littered with deadly booby traps, the first Saw kept Jigsaw hidden & mysterious but since that won't work here he is given a major role in the film & his background & motivations are fleshed out a bit & while the original Saw had a fairly amusing if flawed novelty twist ending I have to say I think the twist ending to Saw II is fabulous, very clever, very well thought out which dovetails the ending of Saw rather nicely & I certainly didn't see it coming at all & I doubt anyone else will either. With a larger cast of character's this is one aspect of the film which is fairly poor with some really poorly fleshed out character's that are there either for exposition purposes or simply to be killed off to bump the body count up.
One aspect of Saw II that I am not a big fan of is how it's shot in a very raw documentary style with a very shaky hand-held camera feel & some annoyingly quick editing although having said that it's not as bad as some films & at least I could always make out what was happening. The main attraction of a film like Saw II for most viewers are undoubtedly the gore set-pieces & torture scenes. The opening Venus fly-trap kill where a spike embossed two piece helmet snaps shut around some poor guy's head is a great way to kick the film off, besides that we get someone tossed into a pit full of needles, a gory slashed throat, some cut off skin, a baseball bat with nails hammered through the end is stuck in some guy's head, someone is shot through the eye & the back of their head is blown off & someone is burnt alive in a furnace. Apparently the whole film was shot in one building in a mere 25 days.
According to the IMDb Saw II had a budget of about $4,000,000 which is no money at all for a major film & it opened 30th October 2005 with over $31,500,000 which was almost the same amount Saw V (2008) opened to this weekend just gone. Filmed in Toronto in Canada to keep the budget down even more. The cast do a decent enough job but some of the lesser character's feel a little faceless as the actor's are given little material to work with.
Saw II is a fine sequel to a surprising smash hit horror film that I actually think is better than the original in just about every way, I liked it a lot & put together a terrific twist ending & some cool gore & torture sequences what's not to like? Followed by the equally as good Saw III (2006) & Saw IV (2007).