Gotta love the concept: a killer gives people a choice, give in and die or struggle and live. That's a setup for a tremendous film. Unfortunately neither this film nor the one that preceded it is that film. I can get behind the logical inconsistencies and not get too bothered. I can even accept the very strange and uncharacteristic behavior of certain characters (assuming they're under pressure and might do the plot-convenient thing at a random moment). And, since I knew what I was getting into when I bought a ticket to see this film, I can accept the fact that there has to be a twist ending.
But with such a rich premise and basically nothing but places to go, I cannot accept that this is the story they chose to tell. It's just stupid. They have a bigger budget, access to actual actors (as opposed to using the screenwriter as the second lead in the first film) and they have the audience expecting that the killer will get away. You don't have that combination very often. And this garbage is the result? For shame.
I guess most of my ire here is over the basic set-up of the story. Five (or six or seven) people are locked up in a house and gradually exposed to a lethal toxin while the hero cop interrogates the killer and watches the proceedings on television monitors. It's like one of those bullshit romantic comedies wherein the entire world order is disturbed just so some schmuck can learn a lesson (Bruce Almighty, etc.). This whole elaborate set-up is just so Donnie Wahlberg's detective can play the game. Thus, I spent the whole film wondering why the hell Jigsaw didn't just kidnap him and make him play. Why go through the trouble of getting caught by the police and setting up this elaborate game and then having to rely on the detective doing exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong moment? Everything has to go exactly perfect for the killer (and it does) in order to pull this thing off. And that's just too much exposure for a guy who would surely know better. If he didn't, he would've been caught long before now.
The other major problem with the film is the twist ending. It's not bad, per se, it's just obvious from about five minutes in. Once Jigsaw says the object of the game is to sit and listen for two hours, the rest of the film is almost moot. There's a fun scare here or there but it's mostly just a way to pass the time until the detective is unable to wait out the two hours and does something stupid that plays right into Jigsaw's hands. Although the specifics of how this happens are interesting and not entirely predictable, the final plot development is greeted with a shrug. Still, there's great promise in this premise and I'd love to see somebody with a brain get in there and do something interesting with it.
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