Not being one to yell at the screen during a movie, I would like to congratulate Saw 2 for provoking my very first in-theater outburst.
The inaugural yelp, which went something like "Don't you dare crawl into that oven!" was, of course, acutely premonitory. It was soon confirmed that Joe Hapless didn't give spelunking through an industrial size furnace during a horror film the second thought it probably deserved.
But more than anything, my desperate cry was indicative of the entire Saw 2 experience, which, with its assortment of inept characters, myriad death traps, and churning clockwork of inevitability, comes closer to watching a meat grinder operate than a true thriller unfold.
The sequel to last year's dark-horse slasher, Saw 2 sees Jigsaw, its trademark serial killer and torture device aficionado, up to his old tricks. This time, however, down and out cop Eric Mathews manages to capture the villain at the film's outset. Mathews, played by Donnie Wahlberg (the less fortunate of the Wahlberg brothers as far as genetics are concerned), finds the pale and wilted sociopath in the final stages of terminal cancer?an oddly frail vision of a ruthless murderer. For Jigsaw, it would seem about time to hang up the splatter-proof parka and call it a day. Perhaps the most twisted of all of Neil Young fans, he would of course rather burn out than fade away.
His next masterpiece involves eight victims cooped up in a booby-trapped warehouse. With only two hours to escape before the nerve gas seeping through the vents takes their lives, Jigsaw's prey must traverse a variety of horrific puzzles to ensure their survival. The catch is that detective Mathews can only watch helplessly as the proceedings unfold on several television monitors, and that one of the eight prisoners happens to be his only son.
There are two games being played here: one between the detective and Jigsaw, the other between the inmates and the bells and whistles of their makeshift prison. As the plot moves forward, the games begin to compliment one another, and the audience soon realizes that the victims have more in common than initially indicated.
Yet the murderous puzzles of Saw 2 don't have the same bite as those of the original. Saw transcended its Razzie-worthy writing and acting through the simplicity of its premise: two people chained inside a bathroom must either cut off their legs in order to escape or find a way to kill the other and thus earn their release. That sort of interesting clash of wits is absent from the sequel, which instead plays like a morbid Home Alone, its characters groping around and clumsily setting off various Rube Goldberg-like devices. Instead of swinging paint cans and pools of marbles, there are eyeball shuckers and exploding mouth braces, which are almost as funny.
The filmmakers behind the original Saw also better understood the mechanics of a truly whopping finale. As the film progressed, the audience felt the proverbial rug beneath their feet before it was satisfyingly pulled out from under them. Not so with the closing sequence of Saw 2, which writhes in over-exertion, too complex to shock and just absurd enough to anger. The filmmakers set the final trap of the film and trigger it at the same time, denying their audience the opportunity to think that they could and should have seen it coming all along.
Saw 2 is a capable Halloween thriller if only for its gritty style and generous helpings of gore. In its attempts to one-up its predecessor, however, this sequel deems obsolete the robust machinery that made the first Saw truly wicked. A shame, really, since the intrigue of the original was in bearing witness to characters forced to kill, not merely set up to die.
Saw 2 is happy to exist as an enthusiastic catalogue of creative fatalities, but then, so is every Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, 13, Childs Play, and Final Destination that ever hit the block. We all know that movies like that can't hope for any form of successful longevity, of course.