Saw III (2006)

THIS REVIEW WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS! 

You know that prediction of torture porn? The thing I HOPED this series didn’t devolve into? Well this is what has happened, and it is only 3 movies in.

OK, that’s kind of unfair. There isn’t much of this torture porn in the film, but that’s another area that this film falters in. When, on the few occasions, it shows the game going on, it is over the top with its torture of its victims and the death of one, who gets frozen, is utterly ridiculous. In fact, that woman is, for some reason or another, naked (or at least, I presume she is, all you see is breasts). This is the definition of torture porn and it is unnecessary.

The plot meanders through two hours of your precious time, going from the game to flashbacks to a woman attempting to assist a dying John Kramer (the Jigsaw Killer) so that he may survive through the test. Yet this isn’t after 15 minutes of uselessness as a detective discovers a dead body with the trademarks of the Jigsaw Killer, followed by her getting killed in a similar fashion and then another 10 minutes of setup until we can actually get to the plot. That’s 25 minutes of the film. Wasted.

And after this barely anything happens. The plot moves slowly, the characters are impossible to connect with and everything falls into place far too easily.

The entire film turns out to be a game for Amanda Young, Kramer’s apprentice. He wants to see if she is capable of keeping someone alive. You see, she has murdered people and creates games that are impossible to complete. Kramer made sure his games were possible to complete and has never murdered anyone.

But this all seems pointless when, in the first film, the only way Lawrence was allowed to escape was by killing Adam. He essentially condoned that murder and made it impossible for Adam to escape. I'm getting some mixed messages here!

On top of this, the game he set up for Amanda was reliant on her committing murder. He knew she would murder from the start, so why would he have her as an apprentice? This movie raises too many questions that the film doesn’t answer.

Plus, this actually turns into one great big Rube Goldberg Machine (something I’m going to be thinking a lot about in the later films, I bet). It depends on exact timing, people doing exactly what Kramer wanted them to do, just so everything could fall into place. With this amount of uncertainty in events Kramer’s plan could have easily backfired, something that I believe the character would not want happening and would make sure everything was set up so that it couldn’t happen any other way.

With Saw II I did have a lot of issues with it, but I still enjoyed it. This one just seemed like a waste of time to me. It was good at ending the first trilogy, but it wasn’t a good film. At all. The biggest problem was its lack of focus and length. If it could concentrate more on key parts of the film it would have been a lot better.

Well, now into Saw IV we go, a film that begins the “I’ve heard people say these ones are the shit ones” saga of the Saw franchise.

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Final Verdict: 4/10

Saw II (2005)

THIS REVIEW WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS!

I was okay with the similarities to David Fincher’s Seven in the first Saw. It was the first in the series, the plot was great and the directing was good too. It carried itself as a standalone piece with obvious influences from elsewhere. But now we have yet another Saw film with heavy Seven themes. It’s at this point I’m wondering “Will the series ever stop being like Seven?” Though I would like this, I fear it will soon turn out to be pure torture porn, akin to Hostel, having the same lack of depth and maturity in its script.

Not that I have got that out of the way I will give a brief summary of Saw II. Imagine the first Saw, but this time the plotline of the captured people runs simultaneously to that of the investigation outside of this. Oh, and now we have 8 captured people as opposed to 2. You basically have the same movie. This time the 8 people are trapped in an entire house, which they must escape or a deadly nerve gas will kill them in a few hours. There are syringes of antidote around the household so that they can save themselves, but these involve completing tasks. One of these 8 people is the son of a detective (Donnie Wahlberg), which is where the investigation comes in. A brutal, brutal investigation.

This is where I get to some spoilers. The majority of the film revolves around completing tasks to get the syringes. But the problem with this is that none of the tasks in the film are completed successfully. One person gets two syringes; then dies before escaping; another person gets their hands trapped; another task ran out of time, bringing images of a deadly Crystal Maze. There is no tension in the film regarding these tasks because none of them ever get successfully completed, thus we stop caring.

The story is pretty well told, but it goes a bit slow. As I just said, there isn’t much tension or suspense. Not only this but the characters aren’t very well developed, being extremely one dimensional and thus are hard to identify with. Nonetheless, the plot does move forwards and we are treated to revelations throughout the movie, all culminating to a twist ending that features word play that Derren Brown would be proud of.

As I alluded to in the opening paragraph, this does seem to come dangerously close to torture porn. The fact that the film starts with an opening death made me sigh, and the gore and blood did come close to being excessive and was almost played merely for kicks. This is where I fear the plot will suffer, just to give fans what they want.

But, despite all this, I did enjoy Saw II. It was an interesting story with a good origin story for the Jigsaw Killer. The effects were good and some of the traps, while a bit over the top and Rube Goldberg-ish, seemed pretty inventive and realistic. I have to say I’m quite surprised to see how good these films are.

However, if the editing of the other films causes the screen to constantly flash and have super fast cuts like this film did then I might end up not being able to do the rest of the films as I may end up getting epilepsy!

Final Verdict: 6/10