Bigger Budget, more dumb characters, dumbed down flick

Rating: 3/10 (22 February 2006)

Title: Saw II (2005)
Director: Darren Lyn Bousman
Cast: Donnie Wahlberg, Shawnee Smith and Tobin Bell
Review:
There was no doubt on anyones mind that this sequel would get made after the first SAW film became such a huge success. The people liked something...lets give them more of what they liked! And with more blood, more effects, more actors! And sadly, less suspense and a dumbed down plot! Yeah that will bring them in!
The story for SAW II isn't to hard to summarize. First off the killer known as the Jigsaw, has captured and kidnapped a group of strangers and placed them in a house filled with death traps. Together they must follow the rules of his game if they want to survive. The police commence their investigation to try and save them.
Let me start by saying that this movie is a clone of the first one. Its basically the first movie step by step, everything that you liked from the first one is done here again. Only thing is that since this time you already know whats coming, well there's no real surprise to anything. The Jigsaw traps his victims, places them in an elaborate death traps and he sits back and watches them kill themselves while trying to escape. So there's no novelty in its premise. That jolt you got when you saw the first one, where you didn't know what was going on or what was going to happen next just doesn't happen this time around.
But putting aside the fact that this movie sacrificed its freshness to the altar of sequels, there is some fun to be had with this flick. The only redeeming quality for me in this flick where the kills. I knew the people where going to die at some point, I just wanted to see HOW. And for the most part, the deaths were cool. Not as gory as expected and kind of tame, but cool. Id definitely say that with the exception of the first death with the "venus flytrap" mask, the rest of the deaths in the movie are very mild in comparison to the gruesomeness of the first film.
Now, onto what I didn't like about this film. First off, the characters were the dumbest most unreliable characters I've seen in quite some time! The jigsaw killer left them with some very obvious clues which the chose to completely ignore for most of the movie...right until the last part! I'm like Hello! wake up he left you idiots plenty of clues! But no, we have to stretch the movie so lets let them be idiots for most of the film. I didn't like that. It just felt like an excuse to stretch the running time of the film.
They would fall into the traps so easily...and in one instant when they throw a girl into a pit of needles to look for a key that the killer has placed in it, she starts to savagely look through the needles getting hurt in the process, I found this act to be so dumb! She didn't have to look through the needles like that! She could have done it more carefully so she wouldn't hurt herself, but no, these characters are idiots. And then after all the hoopla has happened you realized she could have gotten out of the pit if she wanted to. It was only like two feet high or something.
Then there's the premise. I loved the idea of the first movie involving only two people for a grand majority of its running time. It was just this intense plot with just two people inside of a room. Now in comes the sequel, and of course this translates to more budget and everything having to be bigger, so what do they do? The have a house full of people ready to die. I personally thought it was more tense with just the two guys in the first film.
As it is, with this film, I got some really strong CUBE flashbacks. Think about it, a bunch of people in a claustrophobic environment, they switch from one room to the next searching for clues on how to get out...and in every room a different form of death awaits them. And just like in Cube, the real conflict comes from all the different personalities just clashing with each other, and of course one of the characters has to be this real asshole that becomes deadly dangerous to the group, just like the Cube films.
The plot was really dumbed down in my opinion. It didn't have the edge that the first film had, it didn't have the element of surprise that the first one had, and the characters were dumb as hell. The only saving grace for this movie in my opinion was the ending and how the film connected with the first. Thats the only really cool thing about it. The rest was just dumb and repetitive.
Rating: 2 out of 5