S10 Reviews: Saw 2 (2005)

Rating: Null/10 (3 November 2005)

The game: six seemingly unrelated people are thrown in a dilapidated house with two hours to figure out how to get the antidote to the poison gas that has infected them. Only a detective with a major stake in the action can unravel the mystery. The jigsaw is back and his game is even more intricate and twisted this go around in this sequel to the highly successful sequel to the 2004 highly imaginative original.
I deliberately avoided reading stuff about the flick (thanks to an incident on the Horror board last year that revealed the twist of the original) so I would enjoy this one hopefully more. It would be hard to replicate the original since the cat's out of the proverbial bag and the novel approach to Saw (2004) was unrepeatable. But the filmmaker's do a good job continuing the story of the first one. The games are more intricate and the action is bloodier. The look of the film is pretty much the same as the original, dirty and grimy. The grit and grain cover the whole canvas which adds to the action. They did go a bit overboard with the choppy editing (especially in the final reel) but that's the brakes. The acting is pretty strong with several recognizable faces: Donnie Wahlberg, Dina Meyer with Shawnee Smith and Tobin Bell returning from the original. The action gets pretty intense at times and some of the death traps are pretty gnarly (ugh, needles) and to no surprise there was a twist ending (supposedly five endings were shot to hide the true ending) and could spin this into a full blown franchise.
In short this is a fine sequel and if you're a fan you will dig it. It channels many things from the original so that would be a wise place to start but if you've not seen you could probably see this one.
3/5 or 7/10