Cinema’s most sanctimonious sicko is back. For six years until 2010, Jigsaw, the moralising serial killer of the Saw franchise, turned up like clockwork in a new torture-porn sequel – each one outdoing the last in vileness. Time was finally called with the bogusly titled Saw 3D: The Final Chapter. Now, with grinding inevitability, comes the reboot, a slick soulless horror flick just in time for Halloween, more trick than treat.
For the uninitiated, Jigsaw is John Kramer (Tobin Bell), a terminally ill sadist and inventor of extravagant death traps designed to torture and kill sinners in revolting ways. Even eight films in, there’s still a hairs-on-the-back-of-the-neck prickle as five strangers wake up groggily from a drug-induced sleep. Each is wearing a metal hood and chained by the neck to a wall fitted with rotating saws. Kramer’s booming voice demands they confess their crimes or lose a limb or three.
What follows is an extreme version of an office team-building away day: as the five must join forces to be freed, work together nicely or drown in a giant vat of grain. When the bodies start piling up, the cops are left scratching their heads, since Kramer has been cold in his grave for a decade. Have they got a copycat killer on their hands? (Presumably one who’s been crowdfunding his seriously high-spec torture gadgetry.)
To their credit, brothers Michael and Peter Spierig – joint directors and newcomers to the franchise – have reset Saw to factory settings, mostly dispensing with the self-involved franchise mythology and nonsensical, convoluted plotting that bogged down the later films. They stick with the core Saw values of zero laughs, one-dimensional characterisation, bland acting and a ta-da twist at the end. Jigsaw feels somewhat tamer than earlier Saw films, its serrated edges less sharp. Or perhaps some us watching have developed thicker-skins, and seeing a human head sliced like a pizza by lasers just doesn’t have the effect it used to.
Why drag the franchise back now? The screamingly obvious answer is sheer cash-grab cynicism. Or perhaps it’s to cater to the generation of kids who’ve grown up riding the Saw-themed roller coaster at Thorpe Park. Either way, it’s depressing.
Source: theguardian
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