This movie made no attempt to capture what was great about its preceeding installment.

"Saw II" is about a less than honest cop named Eric Matthews, played by Donnie Wahlberg (Ransom), who becomes the next victim of a game designed by John the Jigsaw killer. Jigsaw locks Eric's son in a house with a handful of bitter ex-cons, and they all must find a way out before they inhale too much of a lethal nerve gas and die.

The only thing I liked about the movie was the new background information we got on the killer John that we didn't get in the first. Example: Carey Elwes character from the first movie was the doctor who diagnosed him with cancer, and the cancer was his motivation for performing his "work."

That's about all the movie is good for. The rest of the picture is uninteresting, not intense and very ridiculous. In the first movie, there was mystery and intensity.

There was no mystery here. I really didn't care about the people trapped in the house, mostly because many of them immediately leaped into a stereotype of some sort and began yelling at each other for no established reason.

Donnie Wahlberg did his best impersonation of his brother Mark. THIS Wahlberg couldn't deliver a single line, which I could believe and the writers completely gave him nothing but "angry man" cliched expressions.

"If you don't tell me where my son is I'm going to beat the crap out of you." What else would he tell the killer? Why not express that? "You're a psycho" was another one Wahlberg was scripted. That one he says repeatedly.

Basicly, his performance was nothing and got on my nerves after a while. THIS Wahlberg simply cannot play a tough guy. He should stick to playing crack addicts like what he resembled in the start of "The Sixth Sense."

Overall, this movie was only meant to grab some extra dollars and has no merit whatsoever. I can't believe it actually made as much as it did. Teenagers who buy cinema tickets must have a high tolerance for stupid movies. Please, don't see "Saw II." It makes the same feeble attempt of a sequel as "The Blair Witch Project 2" did.

Benn - Where's the Humanity?

Not every movie needs a sequel and especially good movies do not need sequels. Rocky and First Blood are two big examples of movies that do not need sequels. Another example would be the 2004 surprise Saw. The movie Saw was a great thriller and had one of the best ending ever. The sequel is nothing more than a gore fest made for the young adult audience. Saw II is everything that Saw I is not, primarily a good movie.

Saw I was a suspenseful thriller and mystery that needed to be solved with characters that all had some kind of serious flaw. I don't just mean the characters trapped in the room, but the people trying to solve the crime outside. In that movie we didn't see the people go through the torture just the end result, for the most part. But the gore wasn't the selling point of the movie, who was jigsaw was the important fact. Saw II was the exact opposite in that the blood and gore was the selling point. There was no compelling story that drove the action, just a bunch of stupid people and there stupid mistakes getting chewed up, ooooo. The biggest problem is that the first was so good that nothing could be better than it, like making a sequel to the movie Seven or the sup par sequel's to Silence of the Lambs. The only reason to make this movie is money, which it has made a bunch, 20 times as much as it cost to make.

The only actor that did a decent job was the jigsaw killer Tobin Bell (Quick and the Dead) who provided depth to a great killer with a purpose, much like Kevin Spacey's character in Seven. This movie provides a little more detail into the why's jigsaw does what he does, and Bell is very steady, much better than Mark Walberg, oh I sorry, Donnie Walberg (Sixth Sense.) Besides trying to act like a tough guy like his brother, who can pull it off, Donnie was very erratic in his performance. I am sure that his director pointed him in that direction because of the story line, but you could almost see it in his eyes that he wasn't completely sure that he was making the right acting decisions.

Shawnee Smith, the lone hold over from the original movie, did not impress me at all. Every time she was on screen she was annoying and you could tell she was hiding something, which ended up being the 'hook' of the story. She was just an ugly person in an ugly performance in this movie. I also want to mention Dina Meyer (Starship Troopers.) She has a part in this movie and continues to show that she has a great body, but has no business speaking in movies. It's a shame because she is hot.

I also wanted to mention that the script is bad. The ending suggests that Jigsaw's work will continue in the form of his apprentice Amanda (Smith.) However, there is no way a former junky can ever come up with the traps that Jigsaw could create. The screenwriter tried to provide a 'shock' ending similar to the original and it didn't work. Leigh Whannel wrote this as well as the original and it's obvious that he missed it on this one. I wonder how much director Darren Lynn Bousman, who is also credited with writing it, had to do with the downward spiral that this movie took.

This is not a good movie and shouldn't be watched. However, judging by the numbers, a lot of people watched it and will unfortunately spawn yet an unnecessary sequel. Skip it, skip it, flush it.

Brian - the Naked Gun