Film Bites

In the aftermath of Saw III, Jigsaw(Bell) is dead. His assistant, Amanda(Smith) is dead. You believe the story has ended, but it hasn’t. SWAT Commander Rigg(Bent) is thrown into the last pieces of Jigsaw’s diabolicle puzzle. In order to save his partner’s life, Rigg must make his own decisions about how to make others pay for their sins and value their lives.

Building the back-story of his previous life, Saw IV delves into what made Jigsaw do the things he does. Before he became a sociopath, Jigsaw was an expecting father. But when a junkie attacks his wife, killing her unborn child, Jigsaw realizes the horrors of the human existence. That, coupled with the knowledge of his progressive brain cancer, builds in him a need to make others value their lives and pay for their sins.

Saw IV rebirths the Saw legacy with twisted plot points and gut-wrenching visuals, and while it’s all in Saw style, it’s different; and not in a good way. What is different about Saw IV is the lack of immediate context for each of the life-threatening puzzles. In previous movies, entire hours were spent building the suspense and revealing different aspects of a “contestant’s” puzzle. Now, the reveal, the build-up and the execution all occur within ten minutes. This is obviously because audiences expect a quick progression, having seen the previous three films.

Slowly, the series has become less about the “contestants” in the puzzles, and more about the police and FBI officers hunting Jigsaw. In the end, all those officers and agents have ended up contestants themselves, leading to the question, ‘*sigh* Alright, who’s next…?’ I remember seeing the first Saw and absolutely loving it. I remember staring in wide-eyed amazement during the end of the film just saying ‘What the f*ck!?’ Not really knowing how everything played out until the very end.

Not so with the latest film. Throughout, I was constantly thinking, ‘How much more of this will I have to endure before the film is over?’ The first film built the story fluidly and deeply; focusing on one puzzle and the story of the two men in a single bathroom. The latest has no fewer than 10 people in 8 puzzles all getting only slivers of screen time before moving on to the next victim.

I guess when a studio has a good idea, they’ll run it into the ground. The problem is, the Saw series is lacking in quality and there isn’t an end in sight. Saw IV ended with an obvious cliffhanger and we can expect another film. Hopefully, Lionsgate will have the foresight to bring a big climatic finish sooner rather than later to preserve the genius that is the Saw series before audiences get bored.