Saw II (2005)

The ruthless, manipulative killer is back at it in this twisted horror sequel. Jigsaw's evil is exposed in the first scene where a man must choose between carving out his eye or having a deathmask full of spikes close on his head. The man makes the wrong decision and leaves a crime scene to be investigated by Detective Eric Matthews (Donnie Wahlberg). The body had puzzle pieces carved out of it. His ex-partner Detective Allison Kerry (Dina Meyer) tries to convince Matthews to work with her on the case. He can't help it and figures out a clue that leads to a SWAT team raid on a booby-trapped hideout and the surrender of John Kramer (Tobin Bell). Jigsaw takes the upper hand when he reveals a set of monitors that show a group of people captures including Matthews's son Daniel (Erik Knudsen).The eight people trapped in the factory all wake up with no knowledge of how they got there. Amanda Young (Shawnee Smith) is familiar with how Jigsaw operates having survived the ordeal before. She finds a tape recorder hidden in the wall which plays the tape of Jigsaw rules. They only have two hours after breathing in a deadly nerve agent and must find an antidote by solving the killer's riddle. Xavier Chavez (Franky G) disobey the order and a man has his head blown off as a result. Matthews must watch his son and the other victims explored the house in search of a way out. It is revealed on another tape that Obi Tate (Timothy Burd) kidnapped the others so he has to crawl into a furnace to get an antidote. He's gets burned alive. Check out more of this review and others at swilliky.com

Movie has some really dull moments and its concentrated more on people panicking than on solving new puzzles and that disappointed me a little. At the other hand, it has some advantages to previous one. While in first movie Jigsaw appears just briefly, in second we have a chance to enjoy great performance of Tobin Bell. Twist at the end, that's maybe even better than in prequel, revels to us a puzzle more complex than last year's. Idea on which movie is based is better than one from previous movie, but realization is weaker. Overall, Saw II is somewhat weaker than its prequel, but still within solid eight.8/10

Michael Marks is a prisoner of Jigsaw. He fails to dig into his own eye socket to find the key and the head trap closes killing him. Police detective Eric Matthews (Donnie Wahlberg) has rebellious estranged son Daniel who lives with his mother. Eric and Detective Allison Kerry (Dina Meyer) investigate another strange Jigsaw murder. They and the SWAT team track down John Kramer (Tobin Bell) at a booby-trapped warehouse. Kramer shows them a monitor with previous survivor Amanda Young (Shawnee Smith) and Daniel among others in a room at an unknown location where they are threatened with death by lethal gas. The group has to search for the hidden antidotes.The most appealing aspect of the original is the simplicity of two men locked in a room. There are plenty of asides but it is essentially about the two men. I miss that simplicity. Instead of a whole SWAT team, it would be more compelling to have only Eric finding John Kramer. They could face off directly mano-a-mano. There are some memorable kills but the movie does tilt over to campiness with the elaborate setups.

Attempting to track down the Jigsaw killer, a detective and his team's raid on a hideout reveals his son's involvement in a deadly game with other victims inside a house filled with traps and must rescue him before succumbing to the traps.This here ended up being quite the overall bland effort here. As with the rest of the franchise, the biggest problem here is with the feeling of his own brand of punishment being too far self-centered that there's little to gleam from the ethics and morality found here which tends to come away rather wholeheartedly. This one spends so much time trying to pontificate over doling out a sense of righteousness to his actions that there's just nothing that can be taken from who he's specifically targeting with this one seemingly bent on trying to bring about the fact that what's happening is of a great good to the individual. The gathered group is all supposedly tied together with the detective yet nothing here is really all that positive about why they're being targeted. Once it's discovered what the connection is, that makes his attempt at teaching them lessons seem even more foolhardy and suspect here with a simply lame reasoning to suspect that he's truly in trouble. Not only that, it's dropped way too late into the film anyway which makes this seem all the more confusing and pointless which renders this one irritatingly non-essential about that twist. Coupled with a series of utterly baffling character decisions that render this one rather non-descript and a bland first half that tends to leave all the kills here in the second half, there's a lot of flaws and problems here. While these here all hold this one down, there's very little here that's worthwhile. All of that positive force here comes from the traps on display, which are quite brutal in their execution if completely lacking in their connection to the types of traps usually featured in the series. There's some rather cruel and brutal traps here, from the crawl through the incinerator or the trap-door pit full of needles that's quite squirm-inducing. The other fine action in the last-half here as everyone turns on each other to get out of the house which gets interesting with some decent brawling and stalking that results in some enjoyable gore, but otherwise the flaws here are more impactful overall.Rated R: Graphic Language, Graphic Violence and children-in- jeopardy.