Saw VI
Director: Kevin Greutert
Writers: Screenplay by Patrick Melton & Marcus Dunstan
Producers: Mark Burg, Oren Koules, Gregg Hoffman
Stars: Tobin Bell, Costas Mandylor, Shawnee Smith, Betsy Russell, Peter Outerbridge, Mark Rolston, Athena Karkanis, Samantha Lemole
“I’m just a soul whose intentions are good
Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood”
-The Animals
Machinery is what The Jigsaw Killer (Tobin Bell) specialized in during his life, and since the Saw franchise that chronicles his exploits has now succeeded in making three sequels after the death of its main character, it is fitting that those sequels feature machines he built or conceived of in life, that are still grinding thoughtlessly on without him. And Saw VI does feature a saw – by my recollection, every film in the series thus far has contained at least one, and you have to think they make sure of things like that.
I have seen all the Saw movies, originally created by director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannell, and have not thought a single one good. But Saw VI, which shows the franchise out of ideas and beyond the threshold of self-parody, has a way of reflecting back on what few morsels of promise existed in the early movies. In hindsight they find themselves improved, now that I have seen how it is possible for them to be worse.
This second Saw trilogy has focused on police Lt. Hoffman (Costas Mandylor), who became one of Jigsaw’s acolyte/assistants, and has taken it upon himself to carry on Jigsaw’s work, with the help of a few audio and video recordings the boss conveniently left behind. Between Hoffman and bear-trap-escaping junkie Amanda (Shawnee Smith, her character deceased but also returning for flashbacks), Jigsaw is more of a delegating manager than a hands-on psychopath. He has so much help that when we now see them in flashback setting up the traps of previous films, it’s like a backstage documentary on show night, everyone wishing each other luck as the curtain is about to go up.
Hoffman is in multi-tasking mode – on the one hand, he is endeavoring to finish covering his tracks by framing an FBI agent he squished in part V for the latest round of Jigsaw-ing. There’s a rather good scene of suspense, where he knows his fellow cops are about to figure out something from an audio recording (which repeats under the scene like a drum to the gallows), and is deciding just what he’s going to have to do about it. Since we know there are no pleasant options, his sweat rather neatly becomes our dread, and there aren’t many times this franchise has pulled off a moment like that.
But at the same time he is administering a complex new game that represents some of the late Jigsaw’s final wishes. It involves a health insurer (Peter Outerbridge) who has become rich by canceling the policies of the sick, and who is forced in the de rigueur dank, booby-trapped labyrinth to, quite viscerally, chose who will live and who will die. The Saw franchise has plenty of bad habits, and one of them is a history of creating characters that, even in a life-threatening moment, are mean, foul-mouthed, and dumb. This episode feature two characters who are plunked in a cage next to a switch parked between two settings – “Live” or “Die” – and need an hour to bicker about what they should do with it. It is less than frightening when a movie like this gives you the easy out of making all its victims venal and nasty, you get to lean back in your chair and never think it could happen to you, since you are such an upstanding citizen.
This Outerbridge is an interesting actor – he looks more than a little like Henry Fonda with his penetrating eyes. Since half the dialogue is semi-intelligent screaming and weeping, and his only calm scenes are in his office pre-kidnapping, repeatedly showing off his heelishness for the viewers with poor retention, this isn’t exactly a showcase for his talents. But there’s something sympathetic about him that you can sense the filmmakers thought could be useful.
It’s Tobin Bell’s performance as John Kramer, aka Jigsaw, that has made him a horror icon that now stands on the shelf with Freddy, Jason, and the other brand-name terrors of the 70’s and 80’s. And he should be commended, his sepulchral visage and quiet self-assurance are magnetic; he convinces you there are ghastly ideas clicking away beneath those dull eyes.
But his characteristically-messy demise in Saw III threatened to rob the franchise of one of its two trademarks; the other being the springs-and-gears contraptions in which he and his accomplices imprison people to creatively destroy their bodies and minds. This time around we get a merry-go-round with one place you don’t want to be in when it stops spinning; and a competitive trap that awards survival to the participant willing to cut off the most of their flesh. The female in the trap (Tandera Howard, who won the role in a reality show that tested her screaming ability) realizes how painful and slow it is to carve off chunks with the smaller knife, and trades up to better equipment. She asks the right question – what the hell was this nightmare supposed to teach her about her job in real-estate loans?
I used to add the caveat that Jigsaw believed (no matter how inevitably he failed) that, with these traps, he was testing peoples’ survival instinct by making them choose between torment and death. But whatever patina of moral purpose the previous episodes were able to harvest from better movies has long worn off, and we now have just the ruthless grinding gears of plot mechanisms. It is only about the mutilation and the kill, and probably always has been. Writers Patrick Melton & Marcus Dunstan, who have kept the scripts churning out annually since IV with increasingly double-jointed application of flashbacks and soap opera contrivances, in a way are demonstrating skills vital to the ongoing life of the franchise. What they have not done is prove this franchise should live.