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oneirophreniaYou know...last Hallamoween, Saw came out: an intriguing, and visually beautiful, if somewhat flawed film that managed to overcome the many illogicalities of its plot by virtue of simply being brave enough to try and brutal enough to make even me wince a few times. It's not an easy film to watch--not because it's particularly gory (it isn't), but because it's so goddamned intense and viscerally nasty. It's a film that makes you question your humanity.
When I heard, earlier this year, that a sequel had already been greenlighted and was in production, I thought: Oh, wow, this is going to suck. Saw was prettymuch a one-trick pony: once you saw how the puzzle played out, you'd realize that if "they" made a sequel to it, it would be just more of the same thing--some people locked in a deadly Hitchcock-meets-Se7en puzzle, gotta figure it out before you both die, blah blah blah....And since the sequel was slated to hit theatres just one year after the first film debuted, I couldn't imagine it being very good.
But then I started reading surprisingly positive reviews of it here and there...so I got curious. Tonight, I went to the "free theatre" (the Carmike whose manager is one of my former students, who just lets me walk in a see anything I like for free) to check out Saw II, thinking that if it completely and utterly blew, I could at least console myself by not having had to pay for the privilege.
Surprisingly enough, it was actually pretty good!
Yeah, there's the ol' Jigsaw puzzles, like before: only this time the main puzzle involves a bunch of people trapped in a house, slowly rotting from an aerosol toxin that is eating their mucous membranes, who have to figure out how they're all related in order to solve the puzzle and administer syringfuls of antidote to themselves. But there's an added twist: one of the people in the house is the son of a cop currently tracking down the Jigsaw killer--who does, in fact, track down the man...now enfeebled, comfined to a wheelchair as the cancer eating up his brain has rendered him weak and nearly dead. So the story plays out on two levels: the fight to escape the house, and the cop's attempts to get the location of his son out of the mastermind himself. An added twist comes in the form of the girl from the first film played by Shawnee Smith, the only survivor of the killer's weird games. She's been tossed into the house with everyone else for having backslid into her drug addiction again....
Of course, nothing is what it seems, and there's no point in mentioning much of anything about the plot without ruining the suspense around which it revolves--but I will say that certain aspects of the puzzles are fairly easy to guess from a viewer's standpoint, yet there are definitely some surprises. The fact that the killer himself is a major character this time around, played very admirably and subtly by Tobin Bell, adds a great deal of perspective and depth to the plot....If anything, though, this film is even more brutal than the first. Not gory: there's blood, of course--the trailer's slogan tells you that right off--but not much of it, nor any horrific wounds. But if you don't cringe seeing a girl crawling around in a pit full of filthy, broken syringes, needles sticking out of her flesh everywhere, breaking off in her muscles, then you've a greater tolerance for witnessing human suffering than even I have. It's pretty gruesome, and savagely intense. And, in the end, a little hokey--just like the first--but so what? It's a thriller, and it thrills. It's tense, vicious, and mean-spirited, and beneath all the craziness of the plot there lies a very Nietzschean theme: some people have what it takes to destroy themselves (metaphorically and physically, in some cases) to become more alive and aware of their existence, and some don't. There are those who will gladly cut the key to a trap out of their own eyesocket with a convenient scalpel, and there are those who won't.
And before you ask, 'cause I know someone will: I am a chickenshit. I would not. Which is why I'd much rather be the guy building the traps instead of the rat in them!
At least now I have some ideas for that unused corner of my basement over by the oil room.
When I heard, earlier this year, that a sequel had already been greenlighted and was in production, I thought: Oh, wow, this is going to suck. Saw was prettymuch a one-trick pony: once you saw how the puzzle played out, you'd realize that if "they" made a sequel to it, it would be just more of the same thing--some people locked in a deadly Hitchcock-meets-Se7en puzzle, gotta figure it out before you both die, blah blah blah....And since the sequel was slated to hit theatres just one year after the first film debuted, I couldn't imagine it being very good.
But then I started reading surprisingly positive reviews of it here and there...so I got curious. Tonight, I went to the "free theatre" (the Carmike whose manager is one of my former students, who just lets me walk in a see anything I like for free) to check out Saw II, thinking that if it completely and utterly blew, I could at least console myself by not having had to pay for the privilege.
Surprisingly enough, it was actually pretty good!
Yeah, there's the ol' Jigsaw puzzles, like before: only this time the main puzzle involves a bunch of people trapped in a house, slowly rotting from an aerosol toxin that is eating their mucous membranes, who have to figure out how they're all related in order to solve the puzzle and administer syringfuls of antidote to themselves. But there's an added twist: one of the people in the house is the son of a cop currently tracking down the Jigsaw killer--who does, in fact, track down the man...now enfeebled, comfined to a wheelchair as the cancer eating up his brain has rendered him weak and nearly dead. So the story plays out on two levels: the fight to escape the house, and the cop's attempts to get the location of his son out of the mastermind himself. An added twist comes in the form of the girl from the first film played by Shawnee Smith, the only survivor of the killer's weird games. She's been tossed into the house with everyone else for having backslid into her drug addiction again....
Of course, nothing is what it seems, and there's no point in mentioning much of anything about the plot without ruining the suspense around which it revolves--but I will say that certain aspects of the puzzles are fairly easy to guess from a viewer's standpoint, yet there are definitely some surprises. The fact that the killer himself is a major character this time around, played very admirably and subtly by Tobin Bell, adds a great deal of perspective and depth to the plot....If anything, though, this film is even more brutal than the first. Not gory: there's blood, of course--the trailer's slogan tells you that right off--but not much of it, nor any horrific wounds. But if you don't cringe seeing a girl crawling around in a pit full of filthy, broken syringes, needles sticking out of her flesh everywhere, breaking off in her muscles, then you've a greater tolerance for witnessing human suffering than even I have. It's pretty gruesome, and savagely intense. And, in the end, a little hokey--just like the first--but so what? It's a thriller, and it thrills. It's tense, vicious, and mean-spirited, and beneath all the craziness of the plot there lies a very Nietzschean theme: some people have what it takes to destroy themselves (metaphorically and physically, in some cases) to become more alive and aware of their existence, and some don't. There are those who will gladly cut the key to a trap out of their own eyesocket with a convenient scalpel, and there are those who won't.
And before you ask, 'cause I know someone will: I am a chickenshit. I would not. Which is why I'd much rather be the guy building the traps instead of the rat in them!
At least now I have some ideas for that unused corner of my basement over by the oil room.
