2 out of 5

Director: Darren Lynn Bousman

While the ‘Saw’ series has successfully managed to build an interesting mythology thanks, in part, to carrying over some creative crew from film-to-film, the visual aspects we associate with the films – ridiculously frenetic editing, torture-gore – really took flight here, and that’s mainly due to director Darren Lynn Bousman.  Within the first few minutes, he introduces us to his takes on the quick-cut, shutter-speed variation, static-to-moving image transition that ‘Saw’ makers James Wan and Leigh Wannell purportedly employed more out of budget constraints and need for time fillers than trying to look cool.  But it’s a sequel, which is supposed to be ‘bigger,’ so I can understand the move.  And thus we move past our first trap-victim opener, which is also more glorifying than unnerving, thus again solidifying the precedent: the traps are the thing.  As the film progresses to show us a handful of these machinations, the design is undoubtedly cool (and the script succeeds in having another impressive last minute reveal), but the connection to Jigsaw’s ‘reason’ for pitting people against these things is even more slippery and tenuous than in the first movie.  Oh well.  Bousman does us the favor of trying some character building, giving us a few minutes of sad-sack detective Eric Matthews before Jigsaw’s kidnapping and imprisonment of his son in a trap-filled locked-down house – along with some other nefarious trap-ees – causes him to revert back to more primal cop instincts that may have clouded his past decisions.  Eric’s arc is well done and a successive follow-up to Doctor Elwes from ‘Saw’, even if the film’s overly masculine yell-yell-punch-swear mentality gets a little annoying.  The bare bones cop set is pretty funny – I guess all the money went toward Jigsaw’s abode and the traps – and it’s a shame that we’re hinted at a house of horrors but are only shown a few similar looking dilapidated rooms.  From afar, ‘Saw II’ is more structurally sound than the original, since it knows what it’s about from the get-go, and not written around a seedling idea.  However, in trying to flesh out jigsaw’s annoying theology, the movie starts to take itself a bit too seriously and doesn’t earn the teeth-gritting horror of ‘Saw’s leg-cutting scene, offering us the grisly upfront.  It’s unpleasant people having unpleasant things done to them.  Cool design or no, that basic formula doesn’t make it too fun to watch.