Released a year after the first Saw film making the franchise a Halloween tradition as every installment has been released in time for creepy season. Tobin Bell and Shawnee Smith return as John Kramer and Amanda Young from the first film. This time they are joined by Donnie Wahlberg (Dreamcatcher and The Sixth Sense) as Detective Matthews who is both looking for Jigsaw as well as his missing teenage son. That teenage son, Daniel, is played by Erik Knudsen (Scream 4 and Continuum) who just happens to be locked in a run down house with seven former convicts. They have exactly two hours before a nerve toxin that is being piped into the house's heating vents kills them. They each must complete a task in order to get the antidote for the poison and to escape the house. What makes the situation especially dangerous for Daniel is all the convicts were arrested by his father. Making things even worse is Matthews was not above creating fake evidence in order to get convictions.
This is where the series goes into the realm of torture porn as some of the tasks are not meant to kill the person attempting them. The microcassette recorder returns again with the Play Me tapes explaining who each task is for and what they must do to complete it. Plenty of twists and turns as well as another surprise ending is enough to keep you interested. Saw 2 is directed by Darren Lynn Bousman (Repo! The Genetic Opera and Mother's Day) who also wrote the script with Leigh Whannell. With a bigger budget more intricate traps were used with what seems like a great deal of the budget going towards gore. Surprisingly enough if Bousman had his way the film would have been even more violent, bloody, and gory as his original version was given an X rating. Due to there being more characters to keep track of this time not as much character development happens with most of the new characters struggling to make me care about them.
Wahlberg is a dirty cop, his kid is a brat but I get it we're supposed to care about him as he is "just a kid", and the rest of the characters are criminals. The oddest miscast I've seen for some time is that cast as one of the convicts is Beverly Mitchell who played Lucy Camden in 7th Heaven. What was the thinking there? Originally recorded with a reported "four or five" endings it left everyone wondering which ending was the real one. Also only the characters featured in the ending were given the entire script. While I appreciate this story nearly as much as the original it doesn't check as many boxes. Proving though that big box office doesn't equal a better movie, this is the largest grossing Saw film in the series. It also proves that it's hard to catch lightening in a bottle and even harder to catch it twice. A step down from the original but still good. Three hypodermic needles out of five.
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