Jigsaw gets political! ‘Saw VI’ Review

Posted on October 27, 2009 - 1:45am by michael Just when you thought there were no sleazy dirtbags left for the annual Saw film to sadistically abuse, the American Health Care crisis serves up a whole bevy of people who just don’t get how valuable life really is. Despite the fact that by simple moral principle I am hardly capable of awarding a Saw film anything over three Beans, part VI has definitely reached that well-deserved glass ceiling. It remains a unique kind of visual and auditory torture to sit through the thing, but this is the best Saw film since Part II, which thus far is still the best in the series. Saw VI is like The Rainmaker, but with vicious torture and mutilation instead of lawyers and courtrooms. But for all of their innumerable limitations, one thing I do like about the Saw movies is that each one continues with the story, adding to an overall storyline rather than just being another entry in a series. However, we have by now come to a point where any continuation of the story is just an added distraction that serves only to stretch the believability factor, which many years ago reached the breaking point. It seems like Jigsaw dies in every successive film, only to return, usually much healthier, in the next one. That’s cool though. I’m a huge Halloween fan and Michael Meyers gets killed every time, too, so who am I to start complaining now? [caption id="attachment_61492" align="alignleft" width="346" caption="William makes his choice..."][/caption] This time around, they have taken a very real issue of the way insurance companies decide which people to extend coverage to and which treatments to cover, and which people are denied. In Saw VI,  Jigsaw takes it upon himself to exact vicious retribution against pretty much everyone working in the health care industry by forcing one company’s president, William (Peter Outerbridge), to play a series of games that involve saving one of his employees by killing another (or others), all the while slowly torturing and mutilating himself.  Meanwhile, the detectives working on the case are dealing with a little Internal Affairs problem that has to do with a Detective Hoffman (Costas Mandylor) taking over Jigsaw’s legacy. Jigsaw’s ultimate purpose is explained more in this installment, and also fleshed out and tweaked to fit just right with the soulless administration of American insurance companies. It has always been one of the series’ central contradictions that Jigsaw sets himself to the task of punishing cruelty in people by torturing and mutilating them, and this one is no different, but as Danny DeVito said in The Rainmaker, “There’s nothing like nailing an insurance company…” Jigsaw’s plan this time is to kidnap nearly the entire staff from one insurance company – the one that denied coverage of an experimental treatment that could have cured his own cancer - and teach them the value of life by giving them an up close and personal view of death. But mostly, it’s that criminally impersonal “formula” that insurance companies use to determine whether it will be in the company’s best interest to provide health coverage to any given person. This is the movie’s scathing indictment of our current health care system, which doesn’t take into account one of Jigsaw’s favorite things, an individual person’s Will to Live, which no formula can measure. So the obvious next step for an elderly man suffering from cancer would be to devise a series of intricate mechanical traps which most certainly can measure a person’s will to live. [caption id="attachment_61494" align="alignleft" width="226" caption="Incidentally, I'm really not sure what to think about the Mutilatrix. She'd look right at home on a Marilyn Manson CD but has absolutely nothing to do with the movie..."][/caption] That reminds me of an interesting scene in the movie, by the way. In a flashback, just after William denies John the coverage needed to treat his cancer, John explains to him that, in the Far East, patients pay the doctors when they’re healthy, and don’t have to pay anything if they’re sick. I’m curious as to what he means by “Far East,” because I've been living in China for three years now and the health care industry here is absolutely in the Stone Age. If you break your leg and can just barely afford to pay for the treatment, they’ll set the bones and stabilize them without any anesthetic, if you can’t pay the extra money for it. I’ve actually seen that exact thing happen to a middle-aged woman with two broken legs and it was scarier than anything in this movie, trust me. But then again, the Saw films are not scary movies, they’re horror movies. Meaning they’re horrible, not scary. Gore hounds will find plenty to satisfy their grim palettes, while the squeamish should have long since learned to stay away. I don’t count myself among either group (I’m definitely a horror fan, but not at all a gore hound), but this time around they were smart enough to widen the movie’s potential audience to anyone who has ever been shocked by the bottom line in the bill from the insurance company, or who would like to see a little more humanity exercised in the health care industry. It's the apex of irony to see a call for more health care humanity in a movie about torture and death, but it’s a step in the right direction! The Bean Meter