Saw III
Yet another formulaic sadistic gorefest. I almost sawed some logs while watching this.
The formula had being perfected for years, and this feels that came out of an industrial process, with pieces of rotting pig meat still attached to it. Considering they farted out a Saw film for seven years in a row in the Halloween week, it was only inevitable. It’s always the same:
- Catch phrase is uttered
I want to play a game…
- Person in introduced, minor personal flaws are taken as cardinal sins
- People are killed metaphorically conducent to said personal flaws
- Jigsaw complains about people not being grateful
- Jigsaw does his toddler routine:
I’m not touching you, just because you killed yourself after failing to release yourself from my over the top trap doesn’t mean I’m guilty!
There’s a Saw leimotif, some discordant violins. Senseless Violins. But they abuse it, it’s supposed to mark important parts.
By this point it’s basically a clip show, a series of short films back to back, with final twists. They might have believed this was just a trilogy, how quaint.
The victims are more and more random people, thinly related to the main villains. It’s full of sadism and ADHD, an almost dark triad. An uglier version of Final Destination, no mirth here whatsoever. I can’t even get mad about waddling into politics by making the only Black victim so far a child killer. It’s just gratuitous schlock all the way anyway, misanthropy overrides bigotry.
This is the one where Dina Mayer is killed off (damn, my favourite character) and a trepanation is done on Jigsaw while he keeps talking in his soft and smooth voice. Pretty sure the trepanation uses F1 pit stop sounds, preposterous. Egas Moniz represent.
I still can’t believe the main character was not Castiel, except fatter.
Other highlights are a character taking a circular saw in hand, ready to chop up a guy and it turns out it only does a small paper cut. Completely anti-climatic…
John Kramer must be fucking loaded, the pig slaughter required dozens of rotting pigs is a massive amount of money literally down the drain. And those engineering marvels. He should have been called Thomas Edison.
Maybe they will setup a whole backstory, his meatpacking bussiness stolen by Tyson Foods or something. Most likely it will be meagre scraps like that lady on the flashbacks and that’s it!
The retcons start already on the third film, they find a need to tie it with the original Saw, but without bringing Cary Elwes back, this is still a budget cash grab.
At least (almost) everybody dies so that the next film can just pretend everyone was faking having gallons of blood gushing from their bodies.
Not gonna win any awards (all those are much better, The Descent is great), but it’s watchable.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.