Cube 2: Hypercube
I didn't enjoy this one nearly as much as the first, but it was watchable. The first movie had a sense of progression and purpose. This movie had very little of that, it was just mostly randomness. The first movie was grounded in reality, and was like a puzzle that felt like you were supposed to find a solution to the complexity of it. This was just a cube designed to screw with you, no established rules for the characters or the viewer, so there was no payoff. The ambiguity of the cube's function in the first movie meant it focused on the characters getting out, and every character seemed to have a function in solving it. In this movie every character had a connection to the cube, but no real purpose to the story itself. Explaining the cube just took away from the cube concept itself. Then we had the generic bland character as the reasonable character you knew would last the longest (and didn't seem connected to the story at all), and the psycho for no reason killing everyone. In the first movie you felt some buildup to the violence, with betrayal and mistrust. The characters all found each other quickly in this one, so it detracted from the scope of the cube's size. The cube was boring, with no visual variation or sense of movement to another location. The deaths were ok, but there weren't creative, the rooms didn't have many cool traps, just weird strangeness, and there was no order to the way the rooms moved. It was just an aimless movie to me.
I'm glad the third movie is a prequel, because it appears as if the cube will be brought back more to the realism of the first movie.