SAW II suffers the fate of many sequels, it mimics the original without quite catching what made that original worth seeing. In SAW I, it was the impish perversity filmmakers Leigh Whannell and James Wan celebrated while plumbing the psychology of victims who have fallen prey to a serial killer with a singular style. Dubbed Jigsaw because of a particular mark he leaves, he doesn’t so much want to kill people as test their willingness to survive at any cost. There’s always a way out, however slim, however gruesome. SAW II, while boasting only the participation of Whannell as a co-writer, picks things up from there and wastes little time in retreading that territory and in living up to its tag line, “Oh yes, there will be blood.” By my timing, it took all of five minutes for someone to fail the test.
It’s that killing that brings us Detective Eric Matthews (a properly shopworn Donny Wahlberg), a big city detective coming unraveled with demotion to a desk job at work, a nasty divorce messing up his private life, and a son who is acting out by starting a life of crime. Things are about to get much worse, of course, and the particulars involve that killing, which had all the hallmarks of Jigsaw, as well as a taunt aimed directly at Matthews by name. He and his erstwhile partner (razor-jawed Dina Meyer), whose job it is to look good while hanging tough, don’t have to wait long in order to out what that means. A raid designed to shut Jigsaw down instead becomes a psychological test for Matthews when the killer’s lair reveals a remote video feed showing Matthews’ son, as well as a troop of strangers, who have woken up trapped in a house pumped full of a lethal gas giving them two hours to live unless they can find the antidote, measured out in handy syringes, hidden throughout the house along with nasty and lethal surprises.
There is a nifty twist that fails entirely to make up for the lame attempt to prolong the franchise beyond this installment or for the ploddingly pedestrian approach director and co-writer Darren Lynn Bousman brings to the table. There are a few slick edits, but for the most part the camera is as lethargic as the housemates become while suffering the effects of the gas that is not only killing them, but making them look like death warmed over long before the big sleep. That there is a uniform lack of conviction on the actor’s part is no help. Also of no help is that the booby traps with which Jigsaw has seeded the house aren’t quite as inventive as the ones in SAW I, and that as in the most generic films of this particular genre, the killings progress in a direct correlation to the ranking each actor has in the credits. The emphasis on those deaths is more on the gobbets of blood than in the horror of trying to survive the ordeal, or in the ingenuity of how it’s accomplished. Clubbing looms large and a dive into a pit of syringes, a no-brainer in the creep-out department, comes across as more icky than terrifying. As for the way out for our housemates that they are all but handed with Jigsaw’s taunting recording that greets them as they wake up, they naturally miss the obvious in favor of stumbling around the decrepit house to be picked off like so many whack-a-moles, though, and this is being far more generous than the film warrants, in a situation like this fight or flight kicks in and adrenaline supersedes reason at such moments.
SAW II disappoints not just as a sequel, but also as a horror flick. The question becomes whose bright idea was it to take it away from the guys who made the first one so much fun and handed it to someone who demonstrates a complete inability to build tension, suspense, or even much interest.
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