Saw II - Electric Boogaloo

Rating: Null/10 (29 August 2006)

Saw was a stylish, gritty horror film made by two independent Australian film makers. Saw II, like so many other horror sequels, is a bloated, hackneyed Hollywood monstrosity that squanders most of the promise of the original and left me disappointed.
I expect horror films to follow some sort of internal logic. Indeed, the best horror creates its own world and set of rules. Saw II throws logic out the window, resorting to a cheesy montage at the end to explain the obvious plot devices. When you add that to poor pacing, a hyper-kinetic editing style and story holes a mile wide, Saw II makes for unpleasant viewing for anyone except the most uncritical horror fan.
Why do producers cast as many out-of-work actors as possible in a film? Instead of the intense character development of the first movie, Saw II is stuffed with an ensemble of ten people we barely know or care about. To totally ruin any illusion of reality, they jam in Beverly Mitchell (best known as the smiling pastors daughter from TV soap Seventh Heaven) as another hapless victim with perhaps three lines of dialog, wandering aimlessly throughout the film for no apparent reason. Jigsaw's new accomplice is also poorly cast, being obvious to the viewer within minutes but lacking both acting skills and sufficient menace for this key role. For those two sins alone, the casting director deserves to face Jigsaw.
By raising the stakes and expanding Jigsaw's Rube Goldberg contraptions to a seemingly endless labyrinth, the entire premise begins to stagger under its own weight. The earlier Saw contraptions were fiendish but on such a small scale I was willing to suspend disbelief. Saw II had so many gadgets it felt like a Bond movie, and there was none of the tension and mood of the original film. I can accept a huge maze loaded with traps, poison gas and automated thousand pound steel doors built by Dr No and henchmen, but not by a wheelchair bound psycho with a single accomplice!
The police depicted in this film are the real horror. They send a single SWAT team after a high-profile serial killer and criminal genius. The backup tech team takes one hour and forty five minutes to arrive. We hear the officers calling for a bomb squad that never shows up. With everything the police know about Jigsaw's predilections for traps, we are expected to believe these officers are foolish enough to enter his lair without a bomb squad? Even two hours after his arrest, there are only a handful of police in the whole building, Jigsaw himself has not been restrained beyond a pair of handcuffs, and nobody has searched his lair. At this point, the plot begins to closely resemble one of Jigsaw's creaky contraptions, and the viewer realizes it is they, not the actors, caught in a hellish device of torture. When they used the 'closing trapdoor' gag not once, not twice but three times, it dawned on me that I just wanted the victims to die and the movie to be done with.
Horror sequels rarely approach their originals. To no great surprise, the Saw movies have plumbed the depths almost immediately. What shocks me more is the number of positive reviews and the high rating on IMDb. If this is the future of horror movies, I would rather read a book.