Saw II is really just an update of the first film but with more people and a larger location, although that doesn't mean it has to be disappointing.

Rating: 6/10 (27 November 2008)

Saw II has that uncanny ability to make you feel as you're watching one of the many, many American TV serials that have popped up in recent years. You know the sort; the drawn out and somewhat repetitive sequence of events that lead from one dark or dingy set piece onto another. The element of crime and murder twinned with the fact many-a police officers are running around trying to solve a crime in progress just cements the feeling and it's this rapid approach to the material that hammers home the race-against-time atmosphere throughout. But in essence, this is alright if done sparsely and within moderation  the reason I hate most television serials has a lot to do with the drawn out manner they take to the material; from face value, characters can travel a lot of distance over a lot of time and not really achieve much which is frustrating, but Saw II seems to get down to brass tacks and just gives you what you want.
This 'what you want' is a mixture of suspense; race against time; something emotionally involving at stake and generally horror and/or gore. They are the hallmarks of generic horror and Saw II delivers perhaps not what you demand but what the genre demands on top of a grungy and depressing approach to cinematography that compliments the enclosed and bleak setting. Much like the first Saw film, unknowns are trapped in a room with no initial knowledge of how they got there  things will become clearer at nicely spaced intervals.
They are there, of course, due to the actions of themselves but the instigations of one other man; he is Jigsaw (Bell) and in Jigsaw we have a villain well suited to the piece. As a horror villain, Jigsaw is not what we expect: he is old, decrepit and barely able to breath or talk. The effectiveness of Jigsaw is in his presence and his 'type' of villain. Saw II is the sort of film that will have most of its viewers squirm in some fashion; it taps into basic fears and phobias but does not make an obvious study. Whether someone's fear or phobia are needles or enclosed spaces, Saw II carries an unpleasant but effective atmosphere and the idea that its villain is an old and incapacitated old man complete with breathing apparatus adds to the squirming nature it carries  do we like seeing an elderly and frail man being threatened and knocked about like this despite his clear delicate complexion?
But of course this effectiveness in appearance of a character can only carry as many cons as it can pros. This is because the emphasis on the weak and frail is so apparent and made to be so effective that it's almost impossible to believe that someone of this disposition is able to own so much real estate and is able to set up so many elaborate traps, not to mention to be able to handpick people out of society and place them there. Jigsaw is an interesting character; the sort of character that by appearance and build appears weak and useless but is constantly in control of any given situation and given a few twists that unravel towards the end, seems to be able to remain deadly calm even when the ball isn't entirely in his court.
The victims this time range from big, broad, egotistical Hispanics to young and insecure kids that are barely teenagers but act as a link to the bigger picture. This is in opposition to two guys, in a room, with restraints around their legs. Saw II's hook is that these several people are given the freedom of their surroundings and the surroundings are an entire house with extra rooms complete with individual traps and 'tasks' of their own. One of this Saw edition's grizzlier scenes involves a woman having to go down into a pit of syringes in order to fetch a key  it's a set up or an idea similar to Fincher's 1995 film 'Se7en' with the idea that people pay for their 'sins' (or crimes in Saw II's case) by way of meeting them head on in an orgy of terror and pain. On this occasion, the person down there (or supposed to be down there) distributed the syringes, complete with drugs, and must now meet his wrong-doing head on.
The film forces its race against time idea upon us via inclusion of a poisonous gas slowly making its way through the victims lungs  if they don't solve the bigger picture, they all die. This actually works against the film in the sense one of the reasons I liked the first Saw was that they had time to think, work things out and do their best to escape. Here, they have limited time and I feel the film would've been better without the inclusion of the gas. What's at stake here is the well being of the hero's child, Daniel (Knudsen), it is policeman Eric's (Wahlberg) problem so remove the poisonous gas and allow the many traps and general desperation of the captives to act as the primary threat to the well being of Daniel.
Indeed, when the captives find out who Daniel is this should act as a further dramatic twist but it falls marginally flat due to the fact we know the gas will kill everyone eventually anyway, regardless of how much everybody knows. The film is by no means great but as a dramatic and grungy thriller with a constant whiff of unpleasantness, Saw II works on a basic dramatic and horrific level.