Necromag.co.uk

Ok, the joke is over. I give in. Whoever decided to punish me for crimes possibly commited in a previous life by taking my beloved Saw and whittling it down to the celluloid abortion i watched last night, you won. Back in 2004 a highly original James Wan film came out which upped the ante on how horror films could also be thought-provoking, as well as highly entertaining, with only one scene (off with your foot) of really high gore. Then the Hollywood sequel machine came knocking, and before you know it, we now have a franchise. The ingenious twist at the end of the first has led to audiences expecting one in each film, so much so that the main driving force behind the marketing campaign for this film was “You won’t believe how it ends.” Not only is it insulting to a movie-going audience to present them with such an easy and unoriginal tagline, but it is downright criminal when the film doesn’t deliver said twist that you couldn’t see coming a mile off. Indeed, unless you have a twist in mind that rivals “Luke, I am your father”, don’t promise what you can’t deliver.

SPOILERS (But you cant really spoil this franchise any more now, can you?)

Now, im aware that studios are under a lot of pressure nowadays, especially when the increasingly chav-like audiences that now accompany the Saw films expect a release every Halloween or there abouts. But this gives no excuse for sloppy filmmaking and storytelling. This film basically has two actors who look a lot like young Sylvester Stallone’s playing cat and mouse while you discover that one of them, playing Detective Hoffman, is and has been Jigsaw’s accomplice from since about Saw 2. The other one, Strahm, having survived a head in the box filling with water trap, is investigating Hoffman while on the sick. Meanwhile, 5 characters who you really couldn’t give 2 shits about because they are so annoying are in a tunnel somewhere undergoing a series of tests, the only good ones involving (surprise surprise) an electric Saw induced 10 pint blood donation to get out of the room, and having heads attached to a pully towards a head hight guillotiney thing. Now, while Saw’s 2,3 and 4 were lacking in a lot of areas, they at least had some pretty ingenious, crude, funny traps which maybe were worth half the entry price. These traps in Saw 5 make the franchise look dull, outdated, boring and unoriginal, which unfortunately it now is. Back to the story, which is mostly really a series of flashbacks showing how Jigsaw recruited Hoffman after seeing him kill his sister’s murderous boyfriend in an unescapable pendulum trap, copycat fashion and blaming him for it. (In retrospect, this actually makes no sense because a flashback actually shows Jigsaw and Hoffman watching this trap happen together, even though Hoffman did it solo as a copycat, and he uses Saw’s voice on the recorder for the trap. IDIOTS!), it attempts to fit the pieces of the puzzle together, but really feels like the filmmakers are grasping at straws because they can’t think of original content.

Please don’t think of this as a review of the film, im just pissed off that the suits can take a beloved, fantastic idea like Saw and rape it 4 times over, with a 5th in stall for next year. I know that by going to see it im technically part of the problem, but I vow never to give any more time, attention or money to this vicious cycle. This series has both jumped the shark and nuked the fridge, and after Saw 2, i would like to introduce a new term for series that have passed their peak, it’s took a fucking syringe bath as well.

James Wan, how could you let this happen!

[JigOx]