Everything you expect from the movie is there. And NOTHING MORE.

Rating: 2/10 (22 October 2006)

For beginners, the movie suffers from the Shyamalan syndrome: you KNOW there's going to be a twist at the end, and you KNOW the writers will do their best to make you go "WOW, I could never tell that was going to happen!". That's obvious right from the start. So, what's the point? Even if you don't know what the revelation will be, you know it WILL be there, and you know it will be in the exact same The Usual Suspects style - which was already done in the first movie. And what's worse: it looks EXACTLY like on the first movie. Exactly. Even without the less-than-subtle throwbacks to the first movie. The writers were willingly delivering "more of the same" to people who wanted it. And there were a lot of them, so who's to blame them? Still, though, the ending isn't the only thing in the movie that matters. The set-up of Saw II is nothing new. For starters, it's Cube - even with the exact number of people (edit: in fact, there's one more person in Saw II, but he dies such a jaw-droppingly contrived death that he isn't even worth mentioning) - but with an over-the-top back story and with idiotic, uninteresting characters. Through the whole movie, I was amazed to see that the characters KNEW what kind of "puzzles" they were to expect, and didn't try to out-trick the puzzles even once - and it was possible. The puzzles AND the characters were there merely to provide sick, gratuitous violence and those intense "psychological" sequences of people screaming and going nuts. And yes, their actions were calculated down to the millisecond to make the WHOLE plan work, with the maximum amount of violence possible. There's no depth to the story. There's not even any development in the relationship between characters. There's just blood, blood, death and people screaming. And I say, what's the need for a Cube rip-off that takes off its most interesting aspects and replaces it with shallowness aplenty? The Jigsaw back story, well, I could live without it. I don't know the need EITHER for a story about 90-year-old Christopher Walken lookalike with a brain tumour and more than sufficient money and time to build ultra-clever "games" which all work flawlessly due to the victims' stupidity and a few plot contrivances. With games and movies like that, I'm thankful we still have Chessmaster. Overall, I'll just stop calling the movie a rip-off of a dozen other movies because it actually looks more like a homage (check the mandatory verbal reference to Last House On The Left); a humble homage; a VERY, VERY humble homage, so it deserves an extra star.