Not a good horror film by any means.

Rating: 1/10 (22 November 2005)

Slasher films experience a resurrection about every ten years. It starts out with an innovative and lower budget film that brings in a lot of revenue. Usually it is just a reinvention of a previously existing genre. In the seventies we had Mike Meyers, the eighties brought us Jason and Freddy, the nineties brought us the constantly changing ghost from Scream and it looks like this decade will be the decade of Jigsaw.
Saw II fails where it's predecessor succeeded. The original Saw was made for a low budget and predominantly took place in one room and was made up of one conversation between two people. Now parts of the dialogue were awkward but it was a challenging and very interesting way to approach a tired genre. Saw II instead of picking up with the idea of the original takes a different direction.
Why need ingenuity when you have money right? It is a haunted house film. People wake up and they do not know why they are in this house. If you pay close enough attention to the dialogue and the camera work; the entire story can be figured out within the first thirty-forty minutes. Sometimes this can be good, get the meat of the plot out of the way and just let the killing commence, but that never quite starts. Instead we go into more meaningless deposition about the value of life and death and what a person really wants in something.
It is as though the filmmakers, writers and all were just going through the motions.
Jigsaw's motives are puzzling, even after they divulge into his past, being sick is not a good excuse to exact revenge on society. If the filmmakers were not attempting to make him more sympathetic it was pure filler.
The ending is the most contrived piece of crap in film-making to happen in a long time. It is original, and creative, unfortunately, like the rest of the film, really contrived.