I have now seen all the Saws and can safely say one good Saw doesn’t deserve another. The first was the best; you can ignore the rest, especially this one.
It’s immensely saddening to watch such dreadful dreck and know that so many pass it off as entertainment. Sure, I’ve enjoyed my fair share of slasher flicks but to bear witness to the ‘torture porn’ offered up these days is like comparing apples to a still beating heart, punched out of someone’s chest and gushing blood all over the floor.
If that image bothered you, then stay away from Saw 3D. In this single 90-minute movie you will see far too many people brutally dispatched by a sadistic killer who first kidnaps them and then traps them in devices that test their wills to live against a clock that has some devious device attached to it. Characters get killed by being shot, stabbed or cut with other sharp implements (including power tools and a large rocket-powered arrow), pulled apart, crushed, burned, hanged, eviscerated, mutilated, amputated, decapitated and just left in a room to die a slow starvation. I had a shower and a stiff drink afterward to help me get rid of the lingering images. It’s rated R for a compelling reason. No one under 18 should be allowed to see it. No one over 18 should be duped into it either.
In this modern age where everything has to be shown in 3D, all of these murders happen with blood, organs and other chunks of flesh flying toward the viewer. Yuck. It’s as unrelenting in its atrocity as it is in its volume. It’s a relentless, non-stop roller coaster that always ends up in pain. The audience is just as trapped as the characters that are kidnapped. We are forced to watch some pretty disgusting things, not the least of which is some of the worst acting ever recorded in a horror movie, coupled with a script that must have been written by Hannibal Lecter’s stupid evil twin.
It’s not enough to say that the ‘entertainment’ value of these movies is morally questionable, but they also mock decent movies by coming out relentlessly every year like clockwork, cheaper than cardboard and as repetitive and annoying as a skipping CD. If you’re interested in the larger story that comes with this entire series, you’re fooling yourself. Sure, it all started off as an interesting concept about a dying man’s desire to show a few liars, cheaters and stealers how to make amends and appreciate their lives by putting them at death’s door. They had to choose to live by being made afraid to die.
That concept has now been bastardized into, ‘Hey, let’s just kill everybody, even the ones who are actually good, decent people.’ Most of this film’s audience will certainly only go for the thrill of watching a poorly made fictional snuff film and not care about the plot, so I’m only going to throw out just a little spoiler as an example.
Bobby Dagen (Sean Patrick Flanery) is the main object of the killer’s attention because he’s a bestselling author of a book about his experiences escaping from the Jigsaw (Tobin Bell). The problem is that it’s a lie. So the killer puts Dagen’s publicist, lawyer and wife into the traps for him to save. It doesn’t work out well for them, except that the author lives. So what’s the point? What lesson did he learn? He can still be successful and wealthy so long as he doesn’t care if his loved ones live or die.
Now that this is the last one of the line, I can say for certain that the first was the best. I’ve seen all the Saws and if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. At least the original had a message. Exercise caution before you go to number seven, though. It’s not for the faint of heart, only the foolish of mind.
