For some reason, I really get a kick out of the HAHAHAHAH at the bottom. I've seen all five movies, so surely someone somewhere is laughing at me!
So the tagline for Saw V is “You won’t believe how it ends.” Yeah, whatever. More like, “you won’t believe that it ends.” And you shouldn’t believe it, either. The grisly series has been a dead horse for three movies by now, but if the rumors circulating the internet are true, there will be at least two more.
In the movie’s defense, there are times when the premise is interesting and creative, at least more than I had anticipated. Eyes will glaze over throughout the audience when the movie starts out with Jigsaw saying Hello so-and-so I want to play a game, but the story that the movie tells is a lot more ambitious than you might think. It’s better than part 3 and 4, but that’s not saying a lot.
The vicious, brutal death-traps remain the centerpiece of the movie, but this one gets extra points because it goes behind the scenes into Jigsaw’s world. The problem is that the movie tries to tell a bigger story than the material can sustain. There is a series of flashbacks that jumps back and forth between past and present (and more than one previous Saw sequel), making the movie convoluted and confusing. You may find yourself wondering why Jigsaw is masked and kidnapping people one moment, and lying in a hospital bed struggling for breath the next.
The Jigsaw Killer - feeling much better than in previous movies...
There are three main stories going on in the movie. Five apparent strangers are forced to perform violent tests in order to get a door to open before it locks forever, and during each test, one person will be, ah, voted off the island. The whole scenario is remarkably similar to Cube, a far more interesting movie.
The other story is a detective named Mark Hoffman who is involved with Jigsaw as sort of an unwilling accomplice, and then there is an Agent Strahm that is investigating the killings from outside Jigsaw’s world, trying to figure out what’s going on while the five strangers are killed off one by one.
By this point in the series, hardcore Saw fans (which I am guessing make up about 90% of the remaining audience) will probably be mostly interested in the new torture devices, but the movie spends a huge amount of it’s relative short running time jumping around in flashbacks and side stories, including one about Jigsaw’s daughter, who has inherited a mysterious box, the contents of which Jigsaw explains are “of grave importance.”
Agent Strahm, early in the film, escapes a trap that was not meant to test him but to kill him, and he begins to suspect a copycat killer or that Jigsaw had an accomplice. Hoffman has a unique involvement in Jigsaw’s killings, and is forced to try to cover his tracks while at the same time overseeing the deadly game involving the five supposed strangers, while they themselves try to get to know each other enough to figure out why they were put there together in the first place.
As before, Jigsaw once again is taking on the laughable mission of trying to clean up where America’s shoddy legal system screws up. The movie opens with a stomach-turning scene involving a guy who slipped through the cracks, serving only five years of a 25-year sentence because of a technicality. I appreciate the effort of the movie trying to make a comment of the shortcomings of the American legal system, but it’s pretty hard to take it seriously when it tries to present the Jigsaw Killer as doing the Lord’s good work. He’s like a Boondock Saint with a violent imagination and a lot more time on his hands.
Detective Hoffman tries to remember what happened when he saw this on "CSI: Las Vegas."
The performances are passable, given the movie that they’re in (which doesn’t really ask much of an actor except screaming), although there are a few moments of remarkably awful acting. Tobin Bell once again lends his creepy voice to a nice synthesizer and then to that creepy doll, but the look of the movie is pretty thoroughly boring. It’s totally lightless from beginning to end, a cheap horror technique that gets real old real quick.
Not much effort is put into having a good twist at the end of the movie, although the closing scene does have the element of surprise and, like mostly all of the movies before it, is pretty painful to watch. This is not the worst Saw film that they have sprung on us so far, but there is definitely nothing in it to make me look forward to any more sequels.