Cube 2 (subtitled Hypercube, in keeping with the theme of esoteric mathematics) is a pointless little exercise in absurdism, not unlike the original. In fact, since the plot is almost exactly the same as Cube, but more scaled down and nonsensical if that's even possible, little reason seems to exist to have this film except perhaps to make the first Cube seem brilliant by comparison.

To begin, a bunch of strangers run into each other in a giant cube, they're all involved with the company that made the cube in some way, and they're all extremely wary of each other and resolve to hide any information they have instead of actually working together to escape. Are we sure the title of this movie is "Cube 2" and not "Cube, Too"? The few differences that do exist serve mainly to make the picture more dull, ridiculous, and painful, such as choosing to forego the multicolor scheme of the first cube and light every room in a harsh white.

So maybe by saving money in this manner, the filmmakers could afford some cooler traps, right? Wrong. All of the "traps," as well as every single gimmick, involve disruptions of the space-time continuum or some such stupidity that is the height of simplicity to avoid unless you're incredibly moronic, which all the characters are, so of course they die. The ending is admittedly less predictable than in Cube, but that's only because it somehow makes less sense. I won't ruin it here, though, since I don't entirely understand it myself.

The second act of the film is torturously slow, for when the characters aren't running willy-nilly from laughable traps such as the screensaver that bounces around a room and chops you up and sucks you in if you touch it and only dissipates when the characters stop running around willy-nilly, or wandering aimlessly through rooms that look exactly the same, they bring the movie ever closer to its merciful end by holding absurd Stoppardesque conversations that are as circular as the cube is not. Of course, the characters' paths through the cube are nothing but circular, as this structure's rooms also move about, though seemingly at the speed of light or something like that; indeed, one of the characters near the beginning insists that he has been revisiting the same four rooms for a good long time, a claim I find highly doubtful, judging by the number of different rooms he enters once he meets all the other people there.

On the subject of characters, most of the new cast members seem to be reincarnated victims of the old cube, as the people in both films share many similar qualities. There is the big, bad psychotic guy, who in this movie gets to kill the same person more than once due to the temporal anomalies that are never fully explained given that the fourth dimension of this cube is supposed to be spacial. Also, there is the mentally deficient person, this time in the form of a senile old lady, though of course she knows more than it may first seem. There is the brainy nerd as well. A lot of the characters get to die more than once.

I could go on, but I'll just close by saying that the ending is extremely disappointing. Each room is numbered, as in the original cube, but the characters are lucky enough to happen upon the body of a physicist or somebody who has done all the work for them and left them with an enigmatic number. But the meaning of this number turns out to be completely useless anyway, and those attempting to escape somehow miraculously find the exit by sheer dumb luck just in time, so it's all pointless.

Rating: 1.5 turkeys.

Scene to watch for: Wow, there's too many. How about psychotic guy watching his own head get lopped off by a stream of time and the other people seemingly not noticing that he was in the process of killing senile lady at that moment?

Best line: Any of the senile lady's ramblings.

Things that make you go "Huh?": So what kind of government conspiracy is this anyway?