There was a lot of anticipation surrounding this movie for me. There was a reality TV competition i watched the year before this movie came out, and the winner of that competition got a part in this movie as her prize. My favorite contestant (Tanedra Howard) won, so I knew she was going to play one of the Jigsaw victims in this movie, and I was excited to watch it. I thought she did a great job, too. She's one of the victims in the opening sequence of this movie, and it was great seeing her get to act (and wow, and ow, and ew). I liked this sequel too, so I was looking forward to checking it out again.
In this entry of the series, the plot gets even more complicated and twisty and confusing. The FBI thinks they know the identity of the protégé helping Jigsaw, so they're trying to track him down, meanwhile Jigsaw's traps are still claiming victims, and there's a new trap we see unfold, where an exec at an insurance company has to learn a lesson about playing with people's lives and what it's like to realize you have blood on your hands because you're at least partly responsible for someone's death. We also get more backstory about Jigsaw's ex wife and what his life was like before he became a killer.
With this entry in the series, I kind of stopped caring about how well everything lined up with previous movies and just tried to enjoy this movie on its own terms. I had the feeling that everything was going to crash and burn with the next movie (back when part 7 was supposed to be the big finale that wrapped everything up) and I had a feeling that the writers were going to drop the ball hard, so I wanted to get whatever enjoyment I could out of this movie. With these sequels, the actors were better than average, and the budgets were high enough for some top-notch special effects, so they were going to be higher quality than most horror movie sequels (especially when we get as far as part 6) so watching the movie was going to be an enjoyable experience even if some of the complex puzzle pieces didn't exactly line up.
Not to be rude or anything, but I've had enough bad experience with insurance companies over the years to have very little sympathy for the main character in this movie, the guy trapped in the main Jigsaw game. He gets to decide which insurance claims get approved and which get denied, so those who get denied can't afford treatment, and most of the time they die. Throughout the movie he keeps insisting that it's not that simple, and he's not directly responsible for anyone's death, but that excuse wears thin after awhile (ok, it wore thin the first time he said it). The thing is, though, that as the movie goes on, I kinda started to feel bad for him. He goes from being smug and detached to showing some real empathy and emotion. Peter Outerbridge plays this character, and he really does a great job with his performance. I actually found myself rooting for the guy.
This movie is gory and nasty business, and it even takes two turns I didn't expect near the end. It was pretty twisted and disgusting and grisly. That's the Saw we know and love! I think the FBI are a bunch of twits for not figuring some things out in this movie, but I guess I can't blame them. They don't have the benefit of knowing what I do, and the evidence they have is purposely twisted to point them in the wrong direction. It still really makes me want to scream at the screen, though. Because I actually kinda liked Peter Outerbridge's character, I am more invested in his journey here, and the deaths in the traps held more weight for me because of that. Plus some of them are seriously cool this time around (merry-go-round from hell, anyone?) Overall I like this sequel, and it holds up to a second watch.
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