Why Did I Do It?

Rating: 1/10 (16 November 2005)

I don't really know why I was so excited to see Saw II. From the second I saw the first preview for it, I knew I would though. It's not like the experience of the first one isn't still seared into the lobes of my brain, aching to be washed away and forgotten like the piece of tripe that it was.
That's why, I guess. I was so enamored of the POSSIBILITY of the first one. There was serious potential there for an excellent movie in the vein of Se7en, even if it had to rip off Se7en a little to get there.
Unfortunately that one, though not as much as this one, was a piece of ass asking to be tossed in the bargain bin at your local supermarket.
This movie is ridiculous, from start to finish. The acting is awful (though Ewes has thankfully been dismissed), the script could have been pieced together with magnetic poetry, and the sets/designs were enough to make a community college theater group blush with embarrassment.
Why did they do it again? Why couldn't they have taken a little time to make a movie that didn't suck? The characters in this one are once again completely and totally incapable of thinking like a rational being would given the situation. There's lots of yelling, screaming, fighting, etc., when just a little bit of chatting could have saved a lot of trouble.
Take, for example, the guy who puts his face up against the door, right as the resident Brute puts the key that was EXPLICITY NOT TO BE PUT IN THE DOOR, in the door. Bam. Bullet to the face. Got what you deserved.
Or let's talk about the oven. Poor guy sure did spend a lot of time looking over that oven before he got in it. Maybe if he'd taken just a second longer he would have realized that the same window that was later broken and that he would become lodged in could have been used to remove the antidote WITHOUT getting roasted up BBQ style.
The syringe part was, admittedly, a good scene. Aside from the bad acting and the ridiculously small amount of time she was given, this one had me cringing.
And the lady with the box? Are you serious? Did someone actually green-light this scene? I've made better decisions after huffing video cleaner than that. She gets one hand stuck, then, in a move of sheer brilliance, gets the other hand stuck instead of using it to unstick the first hand.
Did anyone else notice that there weren't even enough traps to finish everybody off? If the big guy hadn't gone crazy with the makeshift morning star, there would have way more people than antidotes. Just another piece of the "puzzle" that didn't fit.
There's so much more about this that warrants criticism, the lighting, the directing, the sets, the actors, even the soundtrack for Pete's sake. It's just not worth it to me to go into it.
All in all, not as good as the first (which is sad), because it ultimately didn't do anything to really SCARE the audience. At least the first one had a great scene of Carey cutting his foot off with a hacksaw.