Not even worth renting

Rating: 1/10 (23 March 2007)

The weak plot is the biggest (but not the only) problem for this movie. The beginning of the movie contains some typical Saw I scenarios, but it quickly becomes evident that the victims literally could not escape their fates regardless of the amount of will that they mustered. Honestly, I'm not sure it is even physically possible for someone to rip a solid iron hook through his own jawbone in a minute without any tools - not to mention that you find out later that the escape door was welded shut anyway. The tests basically degenerate into ways to torture someone to death without the victim having any chance of escaping - basically false hope. I guess the plot was that this was Amanda behaving badly against Jigsaw's wishes, but he is supposed to be pretty omnipotent, so it seems a little stretched that he wouldn't have noticed the first time that she did this.
The later scenarios, which consume most of the movie, revolve around a perpetually angry guy who cannot move on from his son's death in a car accident. He is confronted with various tests of his ability to forgive people involved in various ways with the accident. The obvious difference from Saw I is that this guy holds the fate of each person he encounters in his hands, and he can relatively easily save them - in one situation, all he has to do is burn his son's belongings in a fire to get a key - but it takes him an inordinate amount of time to accept that he should do this. He's just not a very likable guy and he himself is never really in any danger. It seems unfair and un-jigsaw that this man gets to choose who lives and dies - that is supposed to be left up to the victims who "wasted their lives". In fact, his anger is so great and consuming that it should have been him whose will to live was tested by Jigsaw.
The other aspect of the plot that was boring was the doctor being forced to keep Jigsaw alive or die herself - it just got annoying to shift back and forth between the warehouse life and death scenarios and the Jigsaw deathbed scenes. There really wasn't much suspense in the Jigsaw deathbed scenes.