I wanted to like this movie

Rating: 4/10 (27 October 2005)

I'm not going to talk about the gore and the violence. If you've come to see the movie, you know what's in store for you. I'm also not going to talk about how many stories that this movie rips off - though it will seem new to mainstream audiences because the ideas that this movie does take from (The Dr. Phibes Series, The Cube Series and on a much grander level, Jim Brown's 24/7) aren't common works - so the ideas will seem original.
The problem is deeper than that, yet simple - the cast just isn't likable. Even in the original Saw, although the acting was marginal, you still felt for the characters and you were rooting for them to try to figure a way out of their circumstance. In this one, you really don't care about them (and you certainly won't care by the end of the movie) and you'll be rooting for all of them to be grizzly dispatched. Fortunately, for almost all of them, you'll be getting your wish - and the deaths are rather grizzly and certainly ratcheted up from the first movie.
The one thing for me that usually makes or breaks a horror film like this is the ending. Though there is a much greater closure in this movie than the first one (you won't be wondering what happened to the people in this film - or what happened to Adam and the good doctor in the original, for that matter), the ending (and the aftermath from it) comes up flat. This could have been a very powerful ending - one that sends a message of redemption and could have been very daring to try to prove to us that Jigsaw is actually justified in what he's doing - but instead, all we get is the shadow of a psychotic who is more bent on a vendetta. Instead of a new type of psychological villain in the style of a Hannibal Lechter, we only get a shell of a genius, and that may be the biggest crime of all.