Romantic's Blog

The first "Saw" film was a grisly lark with two men locked in a room, a corpse on the floor between them, and a disembodied voice on tape giving them a series of bad-or-worse choices that might, just might, get them out of the room alive. "Saw" premiered, in all places, at the Sundance Film Festival. It was a plucky little indie, and at the time I laughingly dismissed it with these words: "as if the Max Fischer Players from 'Rushmore' had done a production of 'Seven.'" Six years and six films and millions of dollars later, the "Saw" series comes to an end with "Saw 3D," which literally lunges off the screen with shabby, vulgar vitality to close out the series.
For those of you who've never seen a "Saw" film, congratulations. Oh, and to get you up to speed, the basic through-line is that the Jigsaw Killer places people in traps, lethal Rube Goldberg devices, where you can often save yourself only by mutilating yourself or killing another person or some combination of the two. The Jigsaw Killer (Tobin Bell) sees himself as a kind of life coach: His victims, if they survive, seem to wake up and smell the roses all the more sweetly after they've escaped his literal and figurative devices. Sharp, rusty razors and hydraulic pistons, cruel pointy needles and saw blades that glisten, jaw-breaking torture-masks powered by springs -- these are a few of his favorite things.

Many fans and critics like the "Saw" films because of the Jigsaw Killer's moral code of armed philosophical query; the question is if seven films of slaughter-rinse-repeat moneymaking on releasing studio Lionsgate's part have washed away any real or imagined intellectual underthemes in a river of crimson blood. Also complicating matters is the fact that the Jigsaw Killer died in "Saw III," meaning we've had four films of others carrying on his work (notably Costas Mandylor's demented homicide cop Hoffman). The later "Saw" films, especially "Saw V" and "Saw VI" are a morass of flashbacks and backstory slithering around in an unholy mess that mistakes convolution for complexity. Writers Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan (who've overseen the series since "Saw IV," in the wake of creators James Wan and Leigh Whannell leaving after "Saw III") use retroactive actions and intercutting to previously unrevealed events as plugs to keep the waters of disbelief that seep through the plot holes from sinking the whole enterprise.
Director Kevin Greutert directed "Saw "VI" and was the editor on the previous five films, and he knows well enough to give the people what they want: blood and terror, served up with a dash of morbid moralizing that's long been part of the American pop-culture playbook, from Stephen King's short stories to EC Comics and back to Edgar Allan Poe. But there's nothing in "Saw 3D" with the acid zip of "Saw VI"'s blood-lacquered critique of for-profit healthcare. Instead, we get grisly demises enhanced by 3-D, with tri-pronged and pointy murder machines literally shoved off the screen up into your face. To Greutert's credit, he has one or two interesting sequences (a trap in a room with ripped-up floorboards is vertigo-inducing stuff), but the 3-D is used, as it's been used in horror films for decades, mostly to flick gobbets of flesh off the screen and right at us.
Another "Saw" series tradition -- low-rent, community theater-level acting -- is proudly upheld here. Sean Patrick Flanery is fine as a ex-victim of Jigsaw's who's become a motivational and self-help guru, and Mandylor brings the crazy in time-honored B-movie fashion, while Bell's gaunt look of inquiry --- he's like the Ethics 101 professor from hell -- is still effective. But Chad Donella, as Internal Affairs cop Gibson, is too thick-cut a piece of ham even for this, and Betsy Russell, as the Jigsaw Killer's ex-wife, is remarkably wooden. (And yes, there are a few cameos from familiar faces for fans of the series, which seems like a fairly meager reward for having watched the whole series.)
The "Saw" films have veered between being, at best, awfully bloody and, at worse, bloody awful. They're cheap and rushed-looking -- the blunt reality is that, to Lionsgate, making the traditional Halloween release date for each film seemed a lot more important than making them good, or even making them well. But they also have a giddy bubbly enthusiasm, making audiences squirm and going for the gusto -- and the gore -- with an oddly well-calibrated sense of both excess and restraint.
We're told this is the final "Saw" film, and this film does tie off loose ends (while leaving a shareholder-satisfying escape clause in its back pocket just in case), but it's less the end of an era than the final rattling coughs of a series that died a long time ago. The original "Saw" was hardly anything new, but it was somewhat suspenseful and somewhat grittily inventive. Now, the series' final installment consists of watching a group of murders as inventively gory as they are frustratingly inevitable, with characters replaced by wet bags of blood to bust open in fashions more numb than nightmarish. Sure, you're watching the traps and deaths in 3-D, but the fact is too much overwork, and too much repetition, have made what was once a sharp and shiny single-film idea into what's now a dull, dead franchise.