Saw II Review

Arriving last Halloween without a whiff of hype, psycho thriller Saw became a surprise hit, raking in millions at the UK box office. If anything, the sequel improves upon its predecessor’s perverse fascination with Seven-style murders and brutally violent puzzles. Individual set-pieces crank up the tension to a tasty level of hysteria as the clock ticks down in Jigsaw’s house of pain. Blood is splattered, sprayed and spewed across the floorboards, but the story also spends a little time fleshing out the background motivations of a killer whose intellectual games make Hannibal Lecter look like the compiler of The Sun’s quick crossword. Wahlberg’s dodgy cop might be a hardboiled cliché from his rumpled tie to his short-fuse temper, but the film itself regularly veers off the expected path, catching out the audience with inventive tricks and gruesome treats.