See Saw? Naw.

Rating: 4/10 (26 February 2006)

I moderately enjoyed the first Saw movie, so naturally, I was bound to check out the sequel. It seemed to be getting a lot of praise for being the "greatest horror ever," and "much better than the first," so I obtained a copy and checked it out.
After it was over, I was kind of like, "..meh." I really failed to see how it was better than the first. It was a kind-of-OK horror movie, with many, many problems holding the enjoyment down.
First of all, the acting was so and so. I have to say that some of the actors gave fantastic performances, but there were just as many who were sub-par in their roles. But, you can never expect top notch acting when watching a horror movie. It actually can add to the camp value of the horror, but ONLY when the movie is a cheesefest. Saw II was attempting to be "serious".
The "gore" was not nearly as good as hyped. In fact, the gore is almost non-existent. Okay, so there's a throat slash here, reminiscent of the first movie. But that's about as bad as it gets. The rest of the violence is more mild, with nothing that I would call "gory" (a blood puddle here and there isn't exactly gore). Basically, if it wasn't for the language, this film could have scored a PG-13 rating.
Sadly, I also have to say that it really wasn't scary. You know, at all. I realize there are many others out there who somehow consider this to be the scariest movie ever made. Granted, I've seen at least a billion horror films by now, so my standards are probably higher than normal. So, I guess if you don't normally watch horror movies, this film might be scary for you, but if you're into horror like I am, you most likely won't be scared at all.
All of that can still be tolerable, however. It was the STORY that really brought this movie down. The premise was great. A group of strangers are locked up inside of a house, all poisoned, and they must find antidotes that are hidden throughout. So, it's Cube with a "search for the antidote" twist to it. Not a bad idea, I thought.
The problems came in from trying to link it to the first one. Every tie-in to the original movie was far too coincidental, making the movie seem like a horror-themed sitcom. Throughout the movie, I kept having to tell myself, "Whoa, what a co-wink-a-dink." The big "twist" was a betrayal of one of the characters who is actually B.F.F. with the jigsaw killer. This "twist" shoots the entire movie to hell, because it raises too many, "Well, then why did..." questions that just seem to make the entire story no longer make sense at all. But I think the biggest question I had was, "If they just wanted to capture the cop, then why did they go through the trouble of kidnapping a bunch of other people, building all these traps and doors, and recording the footage? Why not just capture the cop in the first place?" Seriously, it's not like they needed to do all that to capture the cop. They've proved that they can kidnap anybody at any time, regardless of who they are.
Apparently, the script was written as a different movie, but the writer was told to change it into Saw II because the first movie did good in theaters. I have to shake my head as I think about how much better this movie could have been had it been left in it's original form, because it was really the links to the first film and the sitcom-like twists that were way too coincidental (even for a movie) to be taken seriously.
I do not recommend this movie for big fans of the horror genre.