Rating of
2/4
A gory way to spend an evening
goodfellamike - wrote on 10/26/08
There is a modicum of entertainment to be found in Saw III, director Darren Lynn Bousman’s entry into the horror series, though purely for gore-lovers and those not jaded by thriller techniques in horror movies. As with the first two films, Saw III is written by Leigh Whannell, who also played Adam in the original. One wonders if his screenplay was written with the same boost of creativity that inspired the first story, or with dollar signs in his sights. This is a franchise that cashes in, especially around the Halloween season, but at the price of becoming rapidly more violent, unnecessarily gory and convoluted.
Saw III spends a lot of its running time explaining various activities of The Jigsaw Killer (Tobin Bell) and his cohort, Amanda (Shawnee Smith) who was a former victim of Jigsaw’s ruthless games in the maiden film. He is rapidly dying from a frontal-lobe brain tumor, and her emotional status is unstable at best. Their most recent game involves Lynn (Bahar Soomekh), a brilliant doctor addicted to anti-depressants and Jeff (Angus Macfadyen), a man who harbors a ruthless vengeance for the drunk-driving death of his only son. Jigsaw’s game is an intricate puzzle involving torture devices, important moral decisions and strict rules. To survive, you must pay an ultimate price.
To describe the actual story any further may spoil some important revelations, however, along the way, the viewer will be treated to some truly gory moments (bones breaking through the skin, someone being shot in the head, the detailed aftermath of an explosive device, someone getting their chest ripped open, and an exhaustive brain surgery performed in squalid conditions with a power-saw.) This is not a film for the faint of heart! Also, many events in the previous two films will be explained in greater detail, such as the bathroom set-up of Adam and the doctor from Saw I, and what happens to the trapped detective in Saw II. I can’t help but think these scenes function only to fill up the running time since the brilliance of Jigsaw resides in not knowing how he does what he does. If we’re supposed to get insight into Jigsaw’s day-to-day activities, then how come the screenwriter can’t explain how Jigsaw manages to know such sordid and private details of the people he kidnaps. But I digress...this is a film that the viewer can make fun of while it’s on as well as during a post-screening analysis. For instance: why does a man allow half of his face to be ripped off by a frozen piece of metal when he could’ve protected it by simply pulling his shirt up between the metal and his cheek? And when someone is being suffocated by a piece of plastic wrap, why doesn’t this person simply poke a breathing hole through the plastic?
Acting has never been a Saw film’s strong point as proved in previous films by Cary Elwes, Danny Glover and Franky G. Shawnee Smith and Angus Macfadyen do their part in overacting here. Tobin Bell is just as foreboding as he was before, but his Jigsaw character outweighs his performance and becomes less intriguing the more screen time he’s given; Dina Meyer manages to be thankless in all 3 films.
Gore-lovers will no doubt be satisfied by what Saw III has to offer, but anyone expecting good story-telling, intriguing characters or a clever labyrinthian plot will be dissatisfied. All we get is a mish-mashed thriller that purposely plays with the audience’s head and reveals major information too late into the film just to garner a twist ending. The Saw franchise will inevitably keep chugging along, but the creativity and suspense will keep on diminishing. This saw has a rather dull blade! Final Gtrade: C-
