In box office terms, after an unprecedented run of five major international hits in five years, the SAW franchise appears to have finally grown tired : this film’s opening weekend (while still rendering the film instantly profitable) halved the initial take of its three immediate predecessors. It’s a tougher franchise than most from any genre in that it offers a closed door to any newcomers : if you walk into this with no decent knowledge of what has gone before, you are plainly fucked.

   But the blame for this new SAW’s under-performance (aside from its debut coinciding with the runaway success of indie horror PARANORMAL ACTIVITY) owes a lot to the dispiritingly weak nature of last year’s SAW V, an inert stop-gap in the series consisting of a charisma-free leading man repeatedly talking out loud to himself and a pedestrian plot endlessly circling itself. A shame, really, given that SAW VI sees the series back on track to a large extent, amping up the pace significantly, delivering some high-powered shock / suspense sequences and finally giving some closure and relevance to dangling plot threads that SAW IV and V were content to dance around.

   Granted, there is still a tendency to be relentlessly reverential to events from earlier movies. SAW VI follows the trend of its two predecessors by filling in gaps from key scenes of SAW III - gaps that, to be honest, didn't’t necessarily have to be filled. As with its two forerunners it is somewhat compromised in its focus on Jigsaw’s successor by the need to incorporate Tobin Bell’s original puppet master to a strong enough degree to allow him top billing. (And it brings back Shawnee Smith’s Amanda for new footage along with a character we thought had perished in SAW IV).

   We are never in doubt that a formula is being followed, from the spectacular pre-titles carnage to the climactic explanatory montage and a key character’s statement of “Game Over”…but on this occasion the formula reaps rewards. The intelligence and astute attention to continuity shown by screenwriters Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton in their two previous (uneven) SAW movies now pays off in the form of a genuinely effective sequel.

   After the lukewarm nature of SAW V’s all-important set pieces (save for its juicy book-ends) this movie shows a lot more bloody vigor. Its prologue sets the overall movie’s topical themes with a dark sense of humor unusual for this solemn series : the first two victims are (of all things!) irresponsible lenders. The level of intense sadism in this sequence is on a par with the best, nastiest SAW movie (SAW III) as two schmucks are forced to try and save their own lives by competing to see who can cut the most of their own flesh off in 60 seconds. Any Hollywood movie that begins with an obese bloke slashing chunks out of his own fat belly while a thin woman hacks off her own arm to best him deserves plaudits of some kind.

   Thereafter, the movie only occasionally falls into the same kind of narrative dead-ends and plodding procedural shtick of the previous two SAW movies. Editor-turned-director Greutert keeps it moving nicely and doesn't’t let the inevitable avalanche of flashbacks neuter the tension. The main unfolding plot this time out is also a lot more engaging than SAW V’s half-hearted reheating of SAW II’s set-up with five unsympathetic goons. Here, surviving Jigsaw successor Costas Mandylor (again somewhat under-used but with more chance to shine here than before) has framed SAW V’s doomed cop hero for his own games and carries out yet more of Jigsaw’s post-mortem wishes by forcing Jigsaw’s exploitative health insurance broker to jump through a series of increasingly horrific hoops in order to stay alive.

   Police chief Mark Rolston returns from V to try and find the “smoking gun” that will incriminate the suspected, dead Agent Strahm, not catching on (til its too late) that the twitchy-acting Mandylor is actually responsible. And Jigsaw’s widow Betsy Russell’s relevance in all of this is finally clarified after two movies of not much to do. The significance of her role in Jigsaw’s plans - and the contents of the box referenced in V - become clear in the movie’s patented twist ending, which proves to be the best since SAW III, providing a pleasing sense of full-circle closure that you know will (sadly) be squashed for SAW VII.

   The core plot-line of the terrified broker (very well played by Peter Outerbridge with a perfect combination of hate-worthy sleaze ball-ness and poor-bastard sympathy) completing an escalating series of unpleasant tasks may directly echo the torment of Angus MacFadyen in SAW III, but the execution (arf!) is potent and there’s a real tension in these grim challenges. One carousel sequence in which he has to select two of his co-workers to survive from a group of six (all six make up the team he uses to find clauses in clients’ insurance policies that will enable them to avoid paying out) is a stand-out, though there’s also a bravura demise via hydrochloric acid that helps make that entrance fee worthwhile.

   For the sixth film in a horror series, this is an impressive outing, for sure - and a quantum leap above SAW V in its ability to balance the convoluted machinations of its ongoing narrative with enough incident and engagement to avoid the dreariness of its predecessor.