SAW II (Darren Lynn Bousman, 2005) **

Rating: 5/10 (16 March 2006)

SAW (2003) was a modest, effective and innovate undertaking which seemed to please a lot of people at the time. On the contrary, the obligatory sequel is excessive in practically every way: an excess of victims (we have 8 against the first's 2), an excess of bad acting and unintentional humor (the drug-dealer character is especially guilty of both here), an excess of clichés and an excess of stupid dialogue.
The only reason to keep watching is the expected (and gratuitous) display of sadism and the shameless borrowing from older (and better) films: we have a police detective who frames suspects to bring them to justice (a' la Hank Quinlan in Orson Welles' TOUCH OF EVIL [1958]), a psychopath who lures a S.W.A.T. team into a deadly trap (SPEED [1994]), a psychopath who punishes other "sinners" for throwing their lives away (SEVEN [1995]) and, most perversely, a terminally-ill patient deciding to take stock of his remaining days, spend them on a useful purpose thus justifying his existence and, ultimately, ensure that he is remembered after he's gone (Akira Kurosawa's IKIRU [1952])!!
This time around, however, even the "twist" ending (which packed such a wallop in SAW) doesn't work because the incongruity of a character's abduction (given that she had already been a victim of the same psychopath in the first film) gives her easily away to perceptive viewers.