Review #374: Saw II (2005)

October 2026 Horror Reviews #2 - Saw II (2005)

Hot on the heels of the breakout success of Saw the previous year, Saw II follows a detective (Eric Matthews, not to be confused with the character from the hit family sitcom Boy Meets World) whose son seemingly has been kidnapped by the notorious serial killer, Jigsaw. The police track down Jigsaw easily, and the diabolical killer (who is near death suffering from terminal cancer) gives Detective Matthews an offer: sit here and talk with me, and your son will be returned to you, safe and sound. But according to the nearby surveillance camera feeds, his son is currently stuck in one of Jigsaw's death traps with an entire group of convicted criminals, all breathing in a slow-acting poison- unless they can solve deadly puzzles and get the antidote. As we flash back and forth between the two conflicts, will Detective Matthews play Jigsaw's little game or is he going to take the law into his own hands?

It's going to be hard not to spoil my opinion before the end of the review, so I'll just say: I love this movie. I think it might be my favorite Saw film (though it's been a while since I've seen the latter half of the series, so we'll see if that holds true), which is especially crazy considering this movie started out as a completely unrelated script that was changed to make it a sequel! This one is a huge improvement over the first movie in a lot of ways- it looks good, it sounds good, the special effects are great, there's a bunch of actors in here putting on some great performances, and this movie really helped to solidify what would eventually become the signature style of the Saw franchise. 

Over the course of the series the movies all focus on different things- some focus entirely on characters and the traps take a bit of a backseat, and others are all about the traps and the characters are just there as fodder. This one leans a bit more heavily on the character side of things- there's not a ton of explicit traps in here, but just about everything the characters need to overcome feels like it had a lot of thought put into how the characters would interact with it. But the characters all feel fully realized (even though most of them don't get a ton of screen time) and their interactions are entertaining from beginning to end.

This film does feel like it has a few hanging threads though- of the characters that wake up in the murder house, we don't really get a lot of backstory on most of them, and a couple die pretty early and unceremoniously when it felt like they were all going to be significant in some way. Similarly, a couple of the traps that we see really feel like there was a lot that didn't get used in the movie- like when Obi has to climb into the furnace, there's a line on his tape about the devil helping him, and there's a devil drawn on the inside wall pointing at a pressure valve, but nothing gets done with it and the characters never seem to notice it. Similarly, when Addison walks into the room where she sees an antidote in a glass box and gets her hands trapped in it, she finds a tape and tosses it aside without listening (and I think according to the wiki, that trap was meant for someone else anyway), and I've spent years wondering what the tape would have said. I know it was probably intentional for them to stop paying attention to the traps and games after so long of enduring the effects of the poison, but it just leaves me wanting more!

The movie's not perfect, some of the plotting feels a bit underbaked (like how the characters in the house literally just wander around until the story calls for them to find something, I don't know how it could have taken more than like two minutes to find out which doors are locked and which ones aren't) but this one is just so much fun. And even though I feel like everyone reading this is going to have seen the movie already, I won't spoil the ending twist(s)- but I will just say, I think the ending for this movie is possibly the best in the series. (I'll have a lot more to say about it when I review the next movie, since it has a lot to do with where that movie goes.)

Anyway, I really, really like this one, and although I think this is the high point of the series, I hope I find out I'm wrong!

Overall Rating: 9/10 Pits Full of Hypodermic Needles

Needle In A Haystack: When creating the aforementioned pit full of hypodermic needles, the crew spent four days taking hundreds of real needles and replacing the tips with fake ones that wouldn't stab the actors. Apparently, at one point someone accidentally dropped a handful of actual needles into the pit, causing the crew to have to sift through them in order to find and remove the real ones. If only there was an expression that describes this sort of thing!