SAW II (2005)

I have to wonder what happens to the cast and crew who work together to produce the sort of film that is Saw II. I have to wonder that because I don't want to wonder about the sort of people who watch this shit...like me. But, really, what does a production designer talk about over dinner, or dream about at night, when the focus of his work is designing a venus-flytrap-styled head mask filled with spikes that will clamp shut around some twit's head after he fails to retrieve a key that has been lodged behind his right eye?

The Saw films want very much to be "deep" like David Fincher's Se7en. There is a lot of talk about morality and "teaching" people how to appreciate their lives. The victims of each of Jigsaw's (our resident psycho) must endure some hideous torture or self-inflicted pain in order to survive. The will to live must outweigh the ghastly exercise of each trap.

Here we have 8 people trapped in a house who are breathing in the Tokyo subway nerve gas. There are syringes filled with antidotes that are placed inside giant ovens, wrist slicing boxes, and a gruesome pit filled with hypodermic needles. Each victim is there because of a personal sin against humanity and each trap is designed with a particular victim in mind.

Blah, blah, blah. All of this the viewer may either find genuinely offensive or exhilarating and funny. For me, the real offense is incured with the backstory given the villainous Jigsaw. He is a man not only dying of cancer but a survivor of a horrific car-crash/suicide attempt as well. A man who supposedly wants to open people's eyes (sometimes literally) to the truth of their own wasted lives. And in order to accomplish this, he finds the ways and means to kidnap people and plant them inside elaborate traps that he has painstakingly designed and crafted. The house the 8 victims are trapped in is filled with steel doors that open and shut with timers. A bank safe covering a trap door. A hole carved out of a hardwood floor that gets filled with the aforementioned hypos.

What cancer patient has the time for this? And was this dude a psychopath before the cancer was detected? Was the knowledge of his terminal condition enough to wake up the incredibly resourceful, creative, mechanically clever albeit twisted and misguided craftsman inside him?

The beauty of Se7en is that the killer's plan unfolds beautifully and in a manner that at least creates the illusion of absolute plausability. Saw II, while throwing around moralistic claptrap throughout, is nothing more than drive-in movie fodder. In wanting to preach on the value of life while offering a series of grisly set-pieces, it wants to have its cake and eat it too. By the end of Se7en, we are witness to the horror that while the villain dies at the hand of the anti-hero, that act becomes the last perfectly fitting piece to his violently beautiful puzzle. Now that's a jigsaw worth studying.

I give Saw II, directed by Darren Lynn Bousman, an antidote-filled hypo in hopes that the cure will end this rubbish once and for all.