Courtesy Lionsgate
A million years later and it’s still hard to understand why the first Saw movie captured the hearts of the horror faithful. Oh, sure, it was wildly violent and helped us coin the term “torture porn” as if that’s a good thing, but the fact remains it was pretty predictable and pretty boring.
Today, we’re all the way up to Saw X, which is pretty nuts if you only ever saw the first one and then one more because it was at the dollar theater that one time everything else was sold out. And despite the house that filmmaker James Wan built basically becoming a gory Fast and the Furious-caliber franchise, it remains weirdly inconsistent.
In Saw X, the nefarious killer John Kramer, aka Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) is still dealing with a cancer diagnosis he got, like, seven movies ago. He’s only got a few months to live now, though, so he’s pretty weepy about all the quote-unquote work he still has left to do. That work is about using his civil engineering and architecture backgrounds to achieve new heights in sanctimonious cruelty while he doles out self-important lessons about how to live or die in tandem with fucking ridiculous Rube Goldbergian killing machines. He claims that trapping people in them isn’t killing them. Get outta here, bro.
Anyway, Kramer’s fixing to die when he hears of a revolutionary new cancer treatment being offered at an undisclosed location outside Mexico City. So it looks like it’s time for a south of the border fiesta for our…well, he’s not a hero, more like a prick. The only problem is, the people who offer the treatment wrong Jigsaw (no spoilers, but who cares?), so it’s back to killing for the creative, if tedious, old fart.
Bell turns in yet another stiff performance that not only illustrates the absurdity of the Saw premise, but leaves us wondering how Jigsaw has the time and money to put this shit together. Maybe they explained that in another entry, it doesn’t matter. Because people go to these movies to be grossed out—like they guy in the Santa Fe theater who shouted, “Hohohoho! Uh-oh! Haha!” every time someone died. The rest of the cast might as well be credited as a group dubbed “Screamers.” They are fodder and nothing else.
Perhaps the most heinous, however, is the weird implication that we should feel for Kramer, or that it’s a drag he’s got cancer. Not since 1998′s Apt Pupil tried to make us feel for a former Nazi has a movie attempted to elicit such bizarre empathy for a character who is, essentially, just the worst dude ever. Think about that when Jigsaw’s machines are sucking some jerks eyeballs out of his head or, in the case of a previous Saw movie, giving some chump the reverse bear trap. The other players are inconsequential—especially, for some reason, a young kid.
If gore’s your thing and you don’t care that Saw X sidesteps how that can sometimes be fun or funny (looking at you, Clive Barker and Mortal Kombat), here’s your movie. As for the rest of us, we hear Barbie is streaming now.
3
+Created jobs for people in film, probably
-Boring setup; confusing tone; played-out
Saw X
Directed by Kevin Greutert
With Bell, Screamers
Violet Crown, Regal, R, 118 min.
