Saw II

Oh yes, there will be blood - about a teacup's worth, if you're lucky.

"There will be boredom" is a more appropriate tagline for this absolutely worthless mess of a sequel. After the surprisingly great and successful original, Lion's Gate immediately green lit this movie for completion within less than a year. Exactly how good can a film be with such a short production schedule? The answer is not very good at all. In fact, it's downright awful.

Our Jigsaw killer has returned to teach ironic lessons to those who live dull lives, yet are not truly alive. Only this time he attracts the attention of Donnie Wahlberg's half-crazed cop (oh wait, he did that last time as well), who is so thoroughly incompetent at his job you'll want to jump into the movie and throttle him.

Jigsaw has locked a bunch of strangers in a spooky old house with nerve gas slowly killing them off. He gives them loads of clues on how to escape, but since they are all idiots, none of them work together and their utter stupidity only serves to force the lumbering plot along and lead to their well-deserved deaths.

It's not just the bad script that cripples the film beyond repair, but the piss poor editing, cinematography, pacing and characters, too. Director Darren Lynn Bousman isn't exactly Uwe Boll, but his lack of experience gives the whole thing a distinctly amateurish feel.

And don't get me started on how terrible the characters are. Wahlberg plays a cliched stereotype right out of a bad Eighties bottom shelf cop video and the people stuck in the poisonous house are just morons. The original Saw worked so well because we only had two victims, who conversed and worked with/against each other throughout the film. We had a stronger attachment to them. And they looked for logical ways out. This time, we get loads more victims with little explanation on who they are, or what importance they have, and they just never use their common sense.

Another thing that bogs this sequel down even more is its total reliance on condescending to the audience. Any average moviegoer could figure the best way out of most of the booby traps and death scenarios, but these stupid people do the dumbest things so they can get killed and allow the film to offer up another corpse for us to scream at. But not even this works. Some guy climbs into a big oven (only a retard would do this in a horror movie) and is burned alive. But we don't even see anything! And when he tries to pull himself out, not only is he not even burnt, but simply dies for no apparent reason. So his feet got a bit singed, big deal!

Don't expect the bone chilling scares you had first time around. Without the swearing, this would have been a 12A.

The only thing that stops Saw II from being a complete failure is the interesting, if incredibly stupid, plot twist. Is it worth hanging around for 90 minutes just to find out?

Overall, this is a disgrace to the original. Oh, and Saw only appears for about a second and a half.