What you can't do, is save everyone

Tracy: What you can't do, is save everyone.

After the remains of Detective Kerry are found FBI agents Strahm and Perez are called into help veteran Detective Hoffman. But then SWAT commander Riggs goes missing and he becomes the latest officer to become a part of the Jigsaw madness. Riggs must play a game in order to save the lives of one of his best friend, Jigsaw playing on how Riggs will stop at nothing until he feels that everyone is safe.

This is far better then Saw 3 and could still use just a tad more improving to reach the level of the original. All though what Saw 4 did was take us back to the roots of John Kramer, how he became ruthless and deadly. John had more than one reason for doing what he did, and he took it to a whole new level because of one thing that happened while he was with his wife Jill Tuck. I liked it better when Jigsaw John Kramer was just a man with Terminal Cancer looking to teach people what they still had. Now they have Jigsaw painted as the man who had it all and lost it all in a short period of time. The revealing of past events will always happen as sequels progress, but adding too much substance to your character or revealing new info too late in the game can turn people off.

However being that it has been over a year since I last watched a Saw film I am willing to treat this as the first piece to a new beginning to the Saw Series and if I see it that way I can appreciate this film. I liked the first one, original full of tension basically the first purely original horror film in years, the second followed closely behind and I was perhaps looking to the third to close the series, and then when it was the worst of the ones I have seen thus far I really figured there was nowhere else they could possibly go and the legend that was Jigsaw had finally overstayed its welcome. I like the actors that have been attached to these films. Tobin Bell, Danny Glover, Donnie Wahlberg , Shawnee Smith; They have all played major parts and have all done well, but this will perhaps go down as another horror franchise that could not figure out when enough was enough.

Many people tend to only see the Saw films as Gore and more Gore, but they truly do have a message hidden deep down within the hideous traps that Jigsaw sets, that message is that we are in control of our destiny, and if we love what are given and appreciate what we have even if it is not the greatest then we can be happy in life. Jigsaw wants to teach people a serious lesson and he does that, but many people are more fascinated with what gadget he will use next or how these people continue to play his game then they are with the point behind his games. When the producers began to notice this Pattern they perhaps should have perhaps toned down the Gore and focused more on the reason, but this film itself has a random unnecessary scene where a random crime Scene Investigator gets shot with a rod to the head. She was not involved in the game, just a victim of circumstance and a chance for people to see another death.

I appreciate what Saw has done for the Horror genre and what the actors involved have done to prove that acting in Horrors does not in fact have to be atrociously bad. Saw has fallen victim to some of the classic horror clichés like having the main character die only to return in some improbable way or just having it continue after he/she has died. In the end this is just a horror film, that tries to mess with my mind but couldn’t. Come horror genre find a film that can change the way I see the world and mess with my mind for life, I will be waiting.


7/10