SAW III – darren lynn bousman – 0.8 / 10

Basically all this film is saying is, 'Hey, weren’t those first two Saw movies cool?'  It's not an advancement of the form in any way but rather a summation of what’s come before (loaded down with plenty of flashbacks which ruin the first two films on the off chance a viewer hadn’t already seen them).  Admittedly it’s hard to come up with new and ever more brutal traps for people to have to earn their way out of, but it seems to me that the filmmakers here fell victim to the pressure to keep adding new twists.  They bend and contort the story in service of the twists and in the process lose everything that was good about the first two films (not that there was very much, but you know what I mean).

There are so very many things wrong with this film that it’s hard to even know where to begin.  I suppose the biggest mistake the filmmakers made was focusing so much on the lives of the killer couple (let’s call them Mr. and Mrs. Jigsaw).  We see them interacting with each other, see them bicker and argue like an old married couple, but most damaging of all, we see them putting together the elaborate traps in which they will ensnare their victims.

And that's the film’s fatal error.  Seeing how this supposedly sadistic, cruel man carefully paints each little circle onto his puppet surrogate reduces him to the level of some demented craftsman.  Seeing him prepare to lay down in the blood before the events of the first film doesn’t make him scarier, it makes us think of him as some sort of effects shop technician run amok.  It makes us think about where he got the training for such things.  It makes us ask if that light bulb flickering in the background was made to flicker by Jigsaw or if it just happened to be that way.  Did he throw fake grime on the walls to make the place look more intimidating or did he find it that way?  Who knows and who cares?  Focusing on that minutia is the exact wrong thing to be doing in a film like this. 

Add to this the fact that the audience is supposed to have some sort of sympathy for the Jigsaws.  Maybe this wasn’t intentional but when the movie spends more than half its bloated two-hour running time with these characters as they endure mental and physical trials, the film, intentionally or not, is asking the audience to identify with these people-- with these killers.  And once you’ve done that, there’s nothing left to frighten you.  If the killers become real people with hopes and dreams and fears then what’s left to be afraid of?  These horror films only work when the killer is some unknowable evil.  When we learn exactly who and what he is, he becomes just another man doing bad things.

Then there’s the not inconsequential matter of whom they cast in these films.  Saw is pretty much the granddaddy of modern horror films (the latest generation of torture porn horror flicks anyway) so it's reasonable to assume that there's some money behind these films.  Why then can't they get some decent looking people to be in them?  Or, barring that, at least make sure the people in the roles are decent actors who look like they could actually be the characters they’re portraying.  But no, I guess that would be asking too much.

I know the aesthetic of the Saw franchise has become something of a classic (or a cliché if you want to see it that way).  Even still, there’s just no justification for making initial scenes set in a hospital and a bedroom look like the filthy, grimy killing chambers we’ll see later.  Indeed, every argument could be made for making them look as bright and happy as possible so that they’ll stand in stark contrast to the sickly greens and browns of the warehouse we spend most of the film inside.  But the filmmakers behind the Saw movies are, apparently, talentless hacks who stumbled upon a brilliant idea.  And since it seems likely that they never quite understood what people loved about the first film (thinking instead it was the gross-out gags and grungy décor), they had no idea how to give the people more of what they wanted.  And so we get this turd that’s laughable from start to finish and only succeeds in scaring people by using bright lights and loud noises.  That’s not terrifying an audience, that’s making them hate you.  And they should because the filmmakers have no respect for them and no respect for the work they’ve created.  Sometimes shitheads win the lottery, I guess.