Having just seen the first Saw only a week ago, the feeling of having been thoroughly creeped out was still fresh in my mind and nagging me to see the sequel as soon as it came to video. The original, if you haven’t seen it, was the suspenseful story of two men trapped and shackled in an unfamiliar room, with only a rusty hacksaw to free them. As the men pieced together the circumstances that put them in the room, they realized that they were part of a deathtrap devised by a twisted serial killer nicknamed “Jigsaw.” Jigsaw himself professes to have never killed anyone, and that he actually helps people by putting them in deadly traps so that they can appreciate life if they escape.

Saw 2 picks up some time after the original left off. Jigsaw eluded the authorities the first time around, and now a new team of cops has picked up his scent. The police capture him within the first 10 minutes of the movie, only to realize that they’ve been lured into another one of his traps. It turns out Jigsaw is dying of cancer, and as his final intricate work of death art, he has placed the son of corrupt detective Eric Mathews (Donnie Wahlberg) in a house with several convicts whom Mathews put away with planted evidence. Of course the house, whose ventilation system is pumping nerve gas into its occupant’s lungs, is also host to a variety of traps including pits of hypodermic needles and gun-rigged tripwires. But the physical traps are far less deadly than the mixed company that Jigsaw has planted in the house. As time ticks by the convicts begin to realize that that Daniel (Erik Knudsen) is the tie that binds them, and his life is very much in danger if they put it all together.

Saw II captures little of the spirit of its predecessor. In the original film we come to understand that, while the killer puts people in grotesquely violent situations, he does what he does to redeem the redeemable and punish the hopelessly corrupt. Saw was about the dialog between the two victims, and slowly divulged their corruption in such a way that, by the end of the movie, you just might want them to be punished. It was more about the threat of violent death if lessons were not learned than about the violence itself. Saw II was almost exactly the opposite. Within moments of the introduction of a new character we know all of their flaws and what they have done to become part of one of Jigsaw’s games. If you’ve ever seen a Friday the 13th film you can guess which characters will die before the end of the movie. In fact Saw II reduces Jigsaw to little more than a Jason Voorhees that kills with intricate Rube Goldberg-like devices instead of a knife. I recommend watching Saw II if you’ve seen the first, but unless you have that nagging itch to follow the series through, its simply not worth your time.