What the Hell Week: Saw 3D

 Welcome to "What the Hell" week, a series of reviews devoted to films that I hadn't planned on ever seeing, but oh well, why not? I just said "what the hell" and am going to take a look at a few flicks that didn't seem like something I'd want to watch. For those of you hoping for those flicks to have the words "Avatar" or "Twilight" in them, I'm sorry to disappoint - that's not happening. Tomorrow's Retro Review is also a "What the Hell" as in "what the hell was I thinking?," and other than a brief stop for a Video Daily Double on Wednesday, I'll be in "adventurous" mode until Sunday.

---

 Let me get something straight here: there are people that not only watched, but LIKED all seven Saw movies? In particular, there are people who felt that Saw 3D was a fitting close to the series? I know at least two people who have seen and have begged me to watch the films after I abandoned the Saw franchise halfway through Saw III, but both of them claim that the movies get so "stupid" that I'd enjoy them on that level. As I just said, my history with the Saw films is truncated: I kinda liked the first film, less and less on repeated viewings, I hated Saw II, and couldn't get more than twenty minutes into Saw III before I turned it off. I never entertained watching IV, V, or VI, despite attempts to include them in Horror Fests or just for my own amusement. I had no plans to watch Saw 3D, but in the spirit of this theme week, "What the Hell?"

  Detective Mark Hoffman (Costas Mandylor) is hard at work as Jigsaw (Tobin Bell)'s successor, and has his sights set on Jill Tuck (Betsy Russell) -Jigsaw's widow - who tried to kill him with one of her husband's traps. When Jill turns herself in to Detective Matt Gibson (Chad Donella), who has been hunting Hoffman, the killer sets his sights on Bobby Dagen (Sean Patrick Flannery), a survivor of one of Jigsaw's traps, now doing the talk show circuit with his book Survive. The only problem is that Bobby Dagen was never in one of Jigsaw's games, and his attempt to cash in raised the ire of the original moral murderer. Hoffman sets up a real game for Bobby, one designed to test his willpower and see if he can truly call himself a "survivor." Meanwhile, Gibson is drawing ever closer to Hoffman, or is it the other way around?

It's probably worth noting that the title of the film is not Saw VII, but Saw 3D (although I saw it in 2D) - the title on the home video Blu-Ray and DVD may say "Saw: The Final Chapter," but the on-screen title is Saw 3D. Secretly I'd hoped that instead of the seventh entry into what sounds like a hopelessly convoluted series, I would instead see a remake of Saw III, but with 3D gimmickry. Boy howdy do I bet that would have bristled these alleged Saw "fans." Alas, that's not the case, but in for a penny, in for a pound. What the hell, right? I already started watching it...

And what the hell indeed, because not only was it really, really easy to pick up on plot developments in the three-and-a-half films I skipped, but for a film that seems to bring things "full circle," Saw 3D more or less just borrows plot elements from earlier Saw films wholesale: the ending comes directly from Saw II, where a heretofore unknown accomplice of Jigsaw turns up to thwart the plans of a main character, and then locks him in the room from the first film, there's the beginning of Saw III, where a character we assumed was doomed escapes from said room and finds a way to figure into the series again, and another series of non-existent "flashbacks" used to ret-con the series disguised as "revelation" (this I understand figures prominently into Saw IV, V, and VI).

 In the meantime, nothing else has changed whatsoever - the film opens with a kill that has nothing to do with the story, but exists to keep the bored gorehounds that flock to see these films drunk with bloodlust so that writers Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan (Feast, The Collector) can dither around with the plot until the next bloody set-piece. Director Kevin Greutert graduated from Saw editor to Saw director with the sixth and seventh entries of the franchise, and if he was asked to make every room look over-cluttered and interchangeable so that things like a sense of geography were irrelevant, then job well done.

 I don't know whether to blame Greutert, Melton, Dunstan or the actors for the terrible dialogue: one the one hand, someone had to write garbage like "these are my scars... 'cause our minds will heal, but these scars will never go away. These scars shan't be a symbol of shame... they should be worn as a badge of courage," but frequently the delivery is so awful that it does no favors to the screenwriters. Chad Donella's Gibson is so terrible that every scene he has with Betsy Russell (Cheerleader Camp) is laugh out loud funny. I don't think that was the intention. Even Tobin Bell is terrible in his manufactured flashback to connect John Kramer / Jigsaw to Bobby Dagen.

 Special mention goes out to Cary Elwes, who (SPOILER, but like I really care at this point) returns to the role of Dr. Lawrence Gordon, someone I think we all assumed died at the end of Saw, but it turns out didn't. Mostly he growls and grumbles, and really seems pointless in the film until it's time for his not-at-all-surprising "twist" - something you should be able to figure out just by knowing that Dr. Gordon didn't die. If it's that hard to figure out, go back up three paragraphs or think carefully about how Saw II ended.

 Saw 3D makes the critical mistake of being more interested in the cat-and-mouse games between Hoffman and the police than the grand guignol murder set-pieces, so to justify the film's existence for gore obsessed fans and the extra five bucks for 3D glasses, Greutert and the writers shoehorn in some more mostly unrelated "games" with characters that have no bearing on the story itself. The series set the precedent of an opening kill, and Saw 3D's involves a love triangle, a blade see-saw (of sorts) and a reverse pendulum. What I'll give Greutert credit for is putting the trap in full view of passers-by: the trap is in a glass box in the middle of downtown wherever they shot this*, which is a pleasant change of pace from "dingy room," the setting for every other kill in the series. It actually lends a slight sense of tension to the inevitable bloodbath as people begin to panic outside of the trap (even if most of them do nothing to help).

On the other hand, the creative team is so strapped for kills that they include a white supremacist group (led by Linkin Park's Chester Bennington) in a garage "game" so they can quickly rip the skin off of one person's back, run a tire through another's head, rip a man's jaw and arms off, and pulverize the final victim, all in the name of finding a way to get Hoffman from outside of the police station to inside. When you realize that all of that effort went into switching bodies in a bag, the effort seems a little ridiculous, and on top of that, Hoffman also went out of his way to make sure that IF Gibson figured out where he was that a turret machine gun would (SPOILER) kill him and destroy the fake Jigsaw lair.

 The coup-de-grace, however, is not even the Bobby Dagen "game," which has the weakest kills by far (including one that's almost identical to a trap from Saw II), but the fact that in order to squeeze one more drop of blood out of this turnip, the writers create a dream sequence in order to kill Jill off twice in the same movie. The contraption used for the dream sequence feels like a mandate from the studio for one more 3D shot, because there's no reason it would exist in the movie otherwise.

 (for the record, it's easy to see where the 3D would be in the film, even in 2D, and I have to say that it wouldn't be worth the extra cash to me: it mostly consisted of guts, keys, and a hacksaw being flung at the camera)

It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that if the Cap'n didn't mind missing three and a half Saw movies that I'd probably hate Saw 3D, but the series continued success has perplexed me. As someone watching from the outside, I had initially planned to just sit out the whole thing and be happy in ignorance, but at least now I can say that I KNOW I didn't miss anything skipping the middle entries**. Under normal circumstances, this would be a So You Won't Have To, but the whole point of "What the Hell" week is to look at movies that people saw so that I wouldn't have to. I'm doing it anyway, but there's always a chance of a pleasant surprise to come, right?

A final note: while Lionsgate, the creative team, and anybody involved with the sequels swears there won't be a Saw VIII, original creators James Wan and Leigh Whannell have indicated that they would like to come back and "close out" the franchise once and for all. I mention this because later this week I'll be taking a look at one of their non-Saw films, Insidious, but also to indicate that it doesn't matter how terrible a sequel gets, how limply it moves to tie itself with A Nightmare on Elm Street for number of entries, or how inexplicable its popularity is***; there will always be room for one more crappy sequel as long as there's money to be made.






* Toronto, but the film's police station is identified as "Metropolitan Police Station" on the sign, so who knows where they want you to think this crap takes place.
** It was explained to me that Saw 3D was "as stupid" as IV, V, and VI, so I feel confident that I understand what I didn't see.
*** Seriously, if someone would like to explain to me why you keep watching these movies, I'd love to hear it. The "mythology" of the films is constantly being revised because the formula of the sequels are stale and interchangeable, the kills aren't really that impressive, and the acting is borderline amateur hour.