The announcement that a seventh Saw film was going to be made came as no great surprise to anyone. Despite the inescapable feeling that this series has gone well beyond the point of flogging a dead horse, the Saw films continue to turn a reasonable profit. Saw VI ended with the Jigsaw killer’s successor, Detective Hoffman, escaping from a trap set for him by his dead predecessor’s wife and presumably intent on gaining some form of overly conceptualised revenge, and so the scene was set for Saw VII. Only this isn’t Saw VII, it’s Saw 3D. Traditionally in long running series the transition to 3D is a last ditch attempt to refresh something which has grown formulaic and stale. However, in modern times 3D is a gimmick that can be applied to just about anything and with Halloween being upon us it would seem that the success of Saw: 3D is almost guaranteed.
Like every Saw before it some unfortunate soul has to play Jigsaw’s game, this time it’s the turn of Bobby Dagen, played by Sean Patrick Flannery. Bobby is a survivor of one of Jigsaw’s games and has since become the author of a successful self help book. Clearly this was never going to sit well with the husky voiced killer. Whilst Bobby works his way through each elaborate trap, Costas Mandylor’s Hoffman continues his hunt for Jill Tuck, along the way we are treated to a series of extravagant scenes of torture and mutilation that are the calling card of the Saw films. Bodies are torn apart, sawn in half, smashed, burnt, impaled and eviscerated all in glorious 3D. But more than this long time followers of the series are rewarded with the return of a previous victim of Jigsaw in the form of Cary Elwes’s Doctor Gordon, who was last seen hacking off his foot in Saw I.
Seeing Ewles brought back memories of watching that first film, it was new and exciting. Yes there was gore but the true genius of it came through its construction and the intensity of watching two men forced to go to extremes to survive. Seven films later and Saw is little more than torture porn with a plot. What narrative there is takes a back seat to the real aim of the film, to get to the next gory jigsaw killer set piece, and whilst watching a woman get cut in half and explode out of the screen may seem like fun the truth is it isn’t, because we’ve seen it all before. What made Saw a great film was that Adam and Dr. Gordon were well rounded characters, it would seem that characters in Saw 3D are little more than fodder. Ultimately Saw 3D does what it says on the tin, if you want to enjoy a gory movie where guts fly out of the screen then watch Saw 3D, if you want to watch a well constructed piece of psychological horror then watch The Shining. The choice, as Jigsaw would say, is yours.
Review by Elliot Hyams
No comments:
Post a Comment