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 Kevin Thomas
"The good kind of sequel....."
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It goes without saying that the first Saw movie was something of a sleeper hit. As word of how creepy, gory, imaginative and twisted (hell, even the production company are called ‘Twisted Pictures’) it was spread, more people handed over their cash to see the antidote to the barrel-load of sanitised, 12A/15 rated ‘horror’ movies. As with any movie that makes an obscene amount of money compared to the budget (like Blair Witch), a load of moolah is instantly thrown at a hurriedly-made sequel (…like Blair Witch). Luckily, unlike Blair Witch 2, this sequel isn’t total shit.Opening with a pseudo-apology for letting Shawnee Smith escape the reverse-bear-trap in the first one, the first victim suffers a truly horrible torture before dieing in a truly horrible way. From there on in, a join-the-dots story unfolds about an unlucky bunch being stuck in a booby-trapped house full of nerve gas. As is always the case in these types of affairs, there are hidden doses of antidote for anyone brave (or stupid) enough to try and retrieve them. Jigsaw (the dieing mastermind behind all these contraptions) is caught by the cops early on, but the detective leading the investigation finds, to his horror, that the entire bust was a trap and his son is one of the unfortunates trapped in the house. Cue cutting between tense negotiations in Jigsaw’s lair and lots of shouting (and not much else) in the house as everyone tries to figure out how as few people will die as possible.
Let’s face it, the horror genre has never been famous for its characterisation and this is no different. Every single character has been cut and pasted out of the big book of characters that film students get given in their first year of university. We have the detective (who, obviously, is going through a divorce and has a son who hates him cops have to be deep and have issues and stuff), the guy who doesn’t say much but looks ominous in a hoody, the big scary man who ‘doesn’t take shit from no-one’, the girl whose only skill is hyperventilation, a slapper, the rebel teen who really just wants a hug, a sweaty man in a suit and, of course, the token black dude. Added to this are plot holes you could park in, massive continuity errors with regards to the first instalment, daft logic and dafter script. However, for all these faults, none of it impacts on your enjoyment in the way that they would in almost any other film. The strengths of the first one was always the icky dilemmas posed to the victims and wondering not only could they do it, but could you? In this way, Saw 2 is only marginally less successful than the original, but the games thrown in this time around are nearly as skin-crawlingly devious.
True, you spend half the film hoping that the screaming bunch realise that if they would just shut up and talk about the situation, let alone (whisper it) co-opefuckinrate, rather than shout at each other pointlessly then maybe they’d get somewhere. Like outside. But instead, you have to sit and watch as it takes even the steroid-snorting drug dealer close to hours to realise ‘the combination to the safe is in the back of your minds’ actually means ‘there’s something written on the back of your head, pillock’. But still, the sheer nastiness of the action means that such things never sink in. Instead you can only sit as the gore comes thick and fast as they find themselves in ever more disgusting situations. Then, when things finally start wrapping up, it splinters into two. One half of the ending revelations seems like an excusably silly and cheap way to ensure a franchise remains possible once the idea of a terminally ill, wheelchair-bound man setting up an armoured house unaided becomes a little too much to take and the other half is one of the best hand-over-mouth twist finales seen recently.Saw 2 suffers from the problems that beget all horror films, and especially the ones that affected the original, but the sheer twisted imagination, snappy pacing and just plain nastiness of the events that unfold more than makes up for it. So long as you can get past the easily-forgivable holes in the plot, logic and script then the gritty dirtiness of the torture scenes means you’re in for nasty ride as well as an admirable sequel to one of the best horror films of recent times.
 del.icio.us 
link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=13441&reviewer=368
originally posted: 11/08/05 12:11:33
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USA
28-Oct-2005 (R)
DVD: 24-Oct-2006
UK
N/A
Australia
17-Nov-2005
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