The fifth SAW movie in five consecutive years – with a now-expected $30million opening weekend confirming the series as the genre’s most successful franchise ever – is all too clearly the work of an ongoing franchise that wishes its third entry (evidently designed to end a “trilogy”) hadn’t killed off its murderous puppet master, poster boy “Jigsaw”. The strain of keeping the series momentum going while also allowing the top-billed Tobin Bell to keep returning without bringing him back from the dead Jason Vorhees-style, is really showing this time out.
SAW IV just about succeeded in extending the game for another chapter even though it got its plot tied up in many awkward knots. The plodding new movie suggests a series of fraught, creatively empty script meetings working less toward a worthy, intelligent continuation of the series than toward a fast-looming, now-obligatory Halloween release date. At its worst, SAW V smacks of desperation and suggests ending the franchise at this stage, while unlikely, would be a mercy killing.
New director David Hackl was a production designer and second unit director on the preceding SAW sequels and apes the patented style of SAW sequel veteran Darren Lynn Bousman during key dramatic moments while displaying little verve or invention in between. Then again, he’s working with the weakest script of the series : a patchy and slow-paced affair by Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan, who co-wrote SAW IV and have their own franchise (the FEAST movies) soon to reach its third outing.
The chief problem of the fifth installment, more so than any of the preceding four, is that it fails to move the overriding plot forward one iota. It steps back, sometimes WAY back, rather than pushing the series ahead in any way. Even though we have already witnessed a whole plot arc depicting Jigsaw recruiting and training an apprentice (Shawnee Smith’s much-missed Amanda) in SAW III via flashbacks, this film gets caught up in a virtually identical plot arc involving Hoffman (Costas Mandylor). This decision smacks less of wanting to flesh out the background of this now-crucial character than it does of being a means of gratuitously inserting Tobin Bell into the movie via lengthy flashbacks.
Horror franchises, from HALLOWEEN to FRIDAY THE 13TH, have traditionally shown a disregard for continuity as they ratchet up a string of sequels, figuring (quite rightly) that the average fan is less concerned with plot logic and consistency than they are with the ingredients that made the franchises popular in the first place. (The fact that HALLOWEEN 4 clearly conveys Laurie Strode’s death, for instance, does not detract from the enjoyment of HALLOWEEN H20). The SAW movies are unique because of their utter fixation on continuity. This is commendable but also a key factor in the overall failure of part 5.
SAW V, and its immediate predecessor, largely take place right after the events of SAW III, though the prologue death in this film will turn out to have taken place before the events of SAW II, and at one point in SAW V, we are shown characters preparing the execution of a trap that was featured in the very first SAW!! If you’ve been paying really close attention and get a real kick out of putting all the “pieces” together, this kind of dedication to detail will be a major plus point of SAW V. For most audiences, however, the film falls between two stools : if you’ve never seen a SAW film, you’ll be totally bemused (unlike, say, any given FRIDAY THE 13TH sequel, which doesn’t require previous knowledge of earlier flicks). If you have seen every SAW film to date, you’ll likely by just bored by all the reminders, flashbacks and recycled footage – why do we even NEED to see preparation for something that happened four films ago??!
The plot this time? Fresh from his pseudo-Jigsaw work in the confusing but satisfactorily grisly SAW IV, Hoffman escapes the building where almost everything crucial has happened since the first reel of SAW III, and gets rewarded with a promotion by his stupidly oblivious bosses. Agent Scott Patterson, who nearly died as the result of one of Hoffman’s traps (but survived thanks to the world’s least likely nick-of-time, uber-precise D.I.Y. tracheotomy), smells a rat and spends the whole film slowly visiting key Jigsaw trap sites, v-e-r-y gradually putting together all the pieces to conclude that Hoffman is the dead madman’s latest successor.
Meanwhile, in a plot gambit stolen from SAW II, five miserably unsympathetic, interconnected characters are enduring a brand new (though somehow old-seeming) set of traps and challenges, one final collaboration between Jigsaw and Hoffman. Fans of BUFFY and 24 may appreciate seeing Julie Benz in a bad wig and Chloe’s British husband “Maurice” amongst the quintet, but everyone will grow impatient waiting for these selfish bastards to die.
Duff characterization and bad, bad dialogue sink this chapter almost from the start. Some of it reeks of the carelessness that might be inevitable when you’re putting out one of these movies every year : did no one think it would be a mistake to cast a visually dark movie with two leading men who, boasting the same basic haircut, look very similar in certain lighting conditions? Mandylor is at least vaguely menacing as Jigsaw’s recruit, but pity poor Patterson – an actor doggedly trying to bring sincerity to the worst of the script’s bad lines. In a series where intentional humor is non-existent, there is welcome hilarity to be found in the scenes in which he ponders aloud, for the audience’s sake, exactly what he’s thinking. The Basil Exposition of the SAW films, this guy exists purely, and callously, as a device for executing the now-expected mean-spirited twist ending (We’re going to need a montage, folks…).
If you’re in this just for the traps – and, at this stage, who isn’t? – be prepared for at least some disappointment. Invention is clearly flagging, with too many set pieces that are merely unadventurous variations on past traps. SAW V is also the tamest entry in the series since SAW II, with none of the outré carnage of the marvelously unpleasant third movie. Still, for the faithful, there is a good beheading, an excellent, bloody opening homage to THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM, and a final scene involving closing-in-walls that incorporates a splendidly queasy bit of bone breaking.
These scenes aside, this SAW is so clogged by flashbacks and the revival of forgotten plot threads (we finally find out the fate of the kid from part 3!) and old footage that it doesn’t really feel like a new movie at all : it’s like one of those TV shows where a general season over-spend result in a whole episode where the main characters recall past experiences as a means of framing a bunch of old clips.
– Steven West
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
