A worthy sequel, but a sequel nonetheless

Rating: 8/10 (31 October 2005)

I remember watching Saw for the first time and being blown away by what a clever structure had been created in which to build a little house of horrors. The payoff of the first film was wonderful, and part of what makes it fulfilling.
Saw II has the obvious problem that they can't trick you as they had in the original, and I expected that to suck some of the life from the film. I was anticipating a significant increase in the deathtraps and gore to compensate. I was wrong on both counts! Knowing the villain of Saw doesn't detract from the visceral interest of the sequel, and the writers did an excellent job of throwing in equally clever story twists this second time around.
Sadly, there seemed to be a lot less cleverness in terms of the traps and victims. A few people do die from traps, and there is some sense of panic, but from a "what would I do in that situation?" point of view, this is far less interesting than the original. Several of the victims just die quietly or are killed by each other, with nothing novel about the situation, no difficult choices being made by them. It's a shame, because at least for me those horrible choices were part of why the original was so interesting.
Most horror/thriller sequels try to turn up the gore and the terror to make up for lost novelty (see the Cube series for progressively faster and more diabolical traps in each film). Strangely, Saw II seems to do the opposite -- it is in many ways more tame than the first, but if you enjoyed the original you will certainly like this sequel. It is worthy of the title, and has some interesting things to add to this story.