Saw II
Saw had a fair degree of appeal in its own right. The gritty 'what if' question. What if you were locked in a room,
with the only way out to inflict grave bodily harm on another person, or own self. How could you ever possibly know
how one would react. And that's where Saw's appeal was most apparent. It attempted to answer the question and it
did so with little reservation, tackling such age old questions as: Does the thought of ripping the guts out of a
living person to prevent your own jaw from being torn off, make your skin crawl? Ok, so it's not a personal matter of
interest for us all, but there's a primal obsessiveness to watch, and cringe at the thought of 'what if' it were you.
Saw was always going to get a sequel, but was it worth one? Ideally the goal of a sequel is to ramp up the action,
tension, drama, or whatever device made the first successful, build on that and introduce a new angle. By that logic
Saw II is half a success. It does little new, but it uses the same tested formula to pleasing effect. This time
around the main story follows up a group of people locked in a room, rather than just two. This time a room full of cops
are counting down the minutes to rescue them rather than just the two. With that, of course the body count is increased -
a prerequisite of any horror sequel.
The best part about the first film was feeling as though you were making the tough decisions with them. Do you gut a living
person to live yourself, or do you allow yourself to die to let them live? Perhaps that's the easier question, the more
difficult one may be; would you cut you own eye out to prevent a premature death? - quickly, you've got to decide in the
next 60 seconds. There's no easy yes or no, they're 50/50 decisions at the best of times. On any given day your answer
might change. Saw answered the rhetorical, fulfilling a perverse pleasure. How much do you value your life and what
would you do to preserve it?
Aside from the philosophical value of that question, if answers to them were analysed we'd learn more truths about human
nature than we'd be comfortable with. But thankfully, that's not why we're watching Saw II. We're watching because
we're spoon fed answers that aren't rhetorical and have dastardly consequences. Of course, the chances of you or I awaking
in a room of strangers and tested with a range of life-threatening riddles is fairly remote, but the Saw films
allow you to put yourself in that position for a moment - what would you say, what would you do.
Something like that works effectively only so long as the characters in the story are making legitimately reasonable and/or
weighted responses themselves. Whilst the acting in the first film may have been selectively bad, the good writing and
character actions compensated for that. Unfortunately in Saw II there's just too much poor writing to save that
weak performances. If Saw II really wanted us squirming in our seats then we need to feel like the characters don't
deserve to die. It's less about them making the smart decisions and more about making the believable decisions. For
instance, you have 8 people in a house seeking desperately to escape. Two of them start a conversation. Six of them aren't
involved, so logically, you'd expect the other six to continue looking/searching/thinking about finding a way out? Not in
Saw II, they just stand around scratching their heads and gawking like idiots knowing that the time of their death
is drawing closer. The worst part is, it could all have been solved just by filming them walking out of the room - an
audience could assume they're searching some place else.
So you get some early answers to the question of the Saw universe. For convenience, the majority of people in
Saw II are written in to be quite daft, bordering on black holes of ingenuity. Because of that, by default, they
don't value their lives. Any decision they make we know will be the wrong one. What made the first film work is that
you expected one of the two to survive, but you didn't know which, so every decision was important. Here, almost every
decision is a run of the mill waste of time. Saw II would have benefited had more thought gone into the actions of
the trapped characters. Recasting and rewriting the retard cop father character would also have been advisable. He's meant
to be the good guy, but the audience hate him from the start and learn to hate him even more as the film goes on. WTF?
All these character deficiencies really do add up to slap in the face, it's just lazy writing to make people so dumb.
But they don't ruin the film. There's a few deaths in Saw II that are legitimately entertaining, and even one that
boasts the highest ranking on the 'skin crawl' register in some time. The mastermind behind the 'games' of film one enjoys
a significant expansion of dialogue in Saw II, and the film benefits highly from it. The retarded cop father he
deals with through the film threatens to neutralise his performance, but his evil guy charisma eventually wins through. It
wouldn't be Saw II if it didn't attempt a Saw-like twist at the end. The payoff in Saw II is
serviceable, but it won't smack you upside from your blind spot like Saw did. Despite the flaws, Saw II
does end up rewarding the viewer with a decent horror sequel. You may be insulted here and there but it could have been
a lot worse - remember the last time a rushed sequel to hit horror film was churned out? This result almost makes one
thankful.
out of ten
Reviewed by Paul Boschen
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