Overall Rating
 Awesome: 17.89%
Worth A Look: 34.96%
Average: 9.76%
Pretty Bad: 13.82%
Total Crap: 23.58%
10 reviews, 63 user ratings
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| Saw 2 |
by Hawkboy
"Less Story, More Gory."
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This movie is perfect for those people who thought the original "Saw" was too well-acted.Saw 2 certainly follows the rules of sequels as laid out in Scream 2 - the body count is higher, the death scenes are more elaborate, Tori Spelling has a cameo...oh, wait.
The original Saw was another in the popular subculture of movie where the serial killer has a budget of untold millions and is able to construct elaborate machines of ultimate terror without attracting attention or requiring the help of skilled union workers. The rest of the characters in the movie existed solely to fall into the aforementioned traps, all based around the seven deadly si...whoops, wrong movie. Since Cary Elwes was too busy deciding what accent to mangle next, (I vote Spanish!) he declined to return for the sequel. So in this movie we focus more on the Jigsaw killer, who was a mere spectre in the first film.
The police manage to capture Jigsaw pretty early on in the film - probably thanks to an anonymous tip from the casting director of the film, who realised that the guy playing the killer was the only one with any acting ability. He then matches wits with Donnie Wahlberg, which is not exactly "Clash Of The Titans", intellectually speaking. Donnie has a personal interest in the case, as his son is trapped in a death house of Jigsaw's creation along with 7 other people drawn from "Luigi's House Of One-Dimensional Characters". There's the angry guy with muscles, the sweaty guy in a suit, the creepy dude in a hood, three girls, and the wise janitor. They have one dimension to play, and the actors even manage to screw that up. Nevertheless, they are all interconnected in some way, and that may hold the key to getting them out before the poison gas that's seeping through the ventilation system kills them all.
Once again, we find ourselves in a film where everything could be resolved after about 10 minutes of discussion, but sadly, the first obvious connection we see between the 8 people is that they are all dumb as a bag of hair. I realise that the filmmakers are operating within a genre famous for its idiotic characters (The Horror Movie Victim: Wandering Off Alone Since 1975!), but any attempt to solve the mystery laid out by Jigsaw is immediately jettisoned in order to make room for more shouting at each other.
One of the things I liked about the original is that you could honestly see the characters trying to solve the mystery. The audience may have been one or two steps ahead at times, but the main characters were never that far behind. Here, no attempt is made to solve anything - the audience is already waiting outside the death house while the cast is still trying to figure out whether or not the floor in the house is maple or oak.
In scene after scene, the characters run after each other, stumble into the death traps, and act unbalanced. It's too bad Jigsaw was in custody - he probably would have grown so frustrated by the stupidity of his victims that he would have started whispering hints over the house PA.
"Now, remember what I said about the numbers? Yeah? Any thoughts on that? Guys, can we have a discussion here? Creepy Dude In The Hood, you had a question?"
The gore in this movie is impressive in its sheer volume - with movies like this and the upcoming Hostel, it's a good time for people who want to see what the inside of an eyeball looks like.
In the end, it's a cash-in on a previously successful movie, and if this does well financially, it sets up Saw III quite adequately. If the public was looking for a horror franchise now that Friday the 13th and Nightmare On Elm Street have faded into memory, I guess they could do worse. But not much.Of course, at the end there's the inevitable twist ending that makes you rethink the entire movie that you just watched. I think they're still trying to explain it to the characters in the movie. "No, see, what happened was..."
 del.icio.us 
link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=13441&reviewer=27
originally posted: 10/29/05 17:43:10
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USA
28-Oct-2005 (R)
DVD: 24-Oct-2006
UK
N/A
Australia
17-Nov-2005
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