Saw II
See also:
Saw (Uncle Cliff)
If the first Saw felt like it was but a tweak on the excellent claustrophobic sci-fi flick Cube - with a demented moralistic killer nicked straight from David Fincher's Se7en - then Saw II feels like more of the same, with an added whiff of the Resident Evil video games. No, alas there's no zombies here, but the characters who wake up to realise they are the newest victims of Jigsaw find themselves locked in a very creepy looking house that's straight out of the Resident Evil world. They then spend the film acting out very computer gamey missions, like having to find clues in room A to unlock the door to room B, avoid trap in room C, then find a code hidden in a photo in room D that unlocks a safe back in room A, etc. There just isn't the urgency or the claustrophobia to any of these scenes that rival those in the first. Their biggest threat is that they are all slowly dying from a poisonous gas being pumped into the house…oh yeah, and, um, each other!!! The role call of characters here is a list of forgettable stereotypes (the slut, the junkie, the ex-con, the macho-man who only cares ‘about looking after numero uno') that are obviously going to turn on each other when they should be working together to get out because they all carry a piece of the puzzle that could save them…yeah, it's freaking exactly like Cube .
Saw II also features the worst casting of an ‘angry, hard-ass but street-smart black dude just out of jail' I have ever seen. The black guy they've got is a weedy kindda effeminate dude that looks like he wouldn't have lasted a day in prison, unless it was as someone's bitch. It's like they've assumed every black man can pull off the ‘angry hard-ass but street-smart black dude just out of jail' character and just picked the first one they saw. Racist bastards.
Everything that sucked about the first Saw is also still present and accounted for. They still feel the need to cut away from the real action to focus on the b-plot of the renegade cop trying to track down the killer. Like the first film, this stuff is fucking boring. If you're going to come up with such a high-concept premise at least have the balls to stick with it and not feel the need to have something else to cut away to every few minutes. On the upside, the cop in question is Donnie “New Kid” Wahlberg.
Man, I loved the New Kids. For an end-of-year production at primary school me and four friends put on a NKOTB tribute performance – and what a tribute it was; a dazzling facsimile right down to the seamless miming job – and I wanted to be Donnie so bad. But so did everyone. So I next went for Jordan, mainly because I had a Batman t-shirt and so did he. But turns out everyone had Batman t-shirts so I had to be Joey instead. True story.
Back to the movie. The other mistake they carry over from the original is keeping the same killer-who-doesn't-kill thing. Now as an idea, I concede that's a pretty cool one, but that his motives are to kill people who don't seem to fully appreciate their lives (while his life drifts away slowly and painfully to cancer) is, utterly, fucking retarded, and still makes no sense. Just as they have taken the Cube ‘homage' to the next level with this sequel, their riff on Se7en is also amped up, as Jigsaw is captured in the second act of the film and, just like Se7en , spends the rest of the time tormenting the cops with his smarter-than-thou riddles and holier-than-thou moral preachings. But Kevin Spacey this guy is not, and Se7en this film is not, and David Fincher whomever the fuck directed this is definitely not.