I feel like today's post is going to be a short one. Not because I'm being lazy, far from it. It's more that sometimes, even though you're expecting a movie to be bad it comes right out and blows your expectations out of the water and leaves you so lost for words that all you can muster is some angry spittle and a series of unintelligible grunts and syllables.
Now, as much as I kind of enjoy hating on movies (it's sort of my thing, right?) even I realise that transcribing dribbly nonsense is probably not terribly entertaining to read and very likely isn't exactly thrilling to write. There are certainly worse things out there; Polio is pretty shitty I'm reliably informed and one of my cats decided to stick his claws so deep into my face the other day that the resulting scene was somewhat akin to a feline Hellraiser prompting Clive Barker to send me an email threatening to sue for copyright infringement and requesting royalties. I pride myself on being relatively professional so I will dutifully attempt to not just reel out a stream of libellous invective, but at this point I can't make any promises.
Yes, despite my own previous misgivings and a general mistrust of the whole concept I went out and watched what is now the eighth instalment of the Saw franchise, the cunningly titled Jigsaw.
It's difficult to know where to begin, but let's start with the very fact that Saw is even back. Go back, if you will, to 2010. It would be a full 6 years before everybody lost their collective minds over the fact that enough celebrities died within a 12 month period that people not only began actually personifying the year 2016 as some sort of sentient being intent on ransacking Hollywood and leaving only David Spade and Rob Schneider to make movies, but they began threatening 2017 with some sort of mystical vengeance should it dare to try a similar feat. Lionsgate seemed to be preempting this cosmic death pact by putting the nail in the coffin of their longstanding, traditional Halloween franchise and releasing Saw 3D: The Final Chapter. John Kramer was dead, alongside any semblance of originality and most of my drive to watch any further instalments. It wasn't great, but the end reveal was sort of satisfying and it was at least mercifully over. And yet...
Back in the present, somebody somewhere in their infinite wisdom, has decided the world needs more Saw. I went over this in October last year when I first caught the trailer, so we can skip to the real $64,000 question: how the hell are they planning to pull this off? The answer is very simply that they have just 100% re-hashed every trick in the Saw book. This isn't a new movie, it's a patchwork quilt of the other movies with a lick of paint and as such is not only a massive disappointment to a self-confessed Saw fan, but a giant waste of everybody's time.
Very quickly, the plot goes thus: bodies start showing up with Jigsaw pieces missing, voice recordings of John Kramer's voice appear on the bodies, the Police wander around and up their own arses trying to find clues, only to blame each other before the truth behind it all is revealed and we find out exactly how they managed to resurrect a decade-long dead serial killer. Only there's a massive problem in the logic which makes the whole endeavour ultimately pointless. None of the following counts as spoilers because you've already seen each of these conceits before in the preceding seven movies.
So true to Saw form, we flick between five people in one of Jigsaw's games and the Police ineptly bumbling about suspecting literally ever character we're introduced to. As the participants die in the game, they appear around the city hung from bridges, dumped on benches and variously available for the cops to find. John Kramer appears in the game in person, in real time, the coroner's assistant is a Saw junkie, the lead detective is being investigated by internal affairs, the coroner suffers from PTSD and we're invited to believe that each of them could be Jigsaw's assistant right up until the end where we find out that the game was being played ten years ago but was never discovered and the real Jigsaw assistant was hiding look-a-like bodies to confuse the cops into thinking the game was happening at the same time. Except that's utterly pointless; why go to the trouble of exactly recreating an old Jigsaw game for cops who have no idea of that frame of reference, as the game was never discovered? No-one in the film knows about the game so why would it matter what order the bodies were found? And then it hits you like a rusty hammer. These details are purely there to confuse the audience, to make us believe the game is being played in the present day not a decade ago. It has nothing to do with the actual plot and we find out nothing about the copycat victims at all. The first time Saw screwed with our perceptions of time it was fairly clever and nobody saw it coming. This time it's just so blatantly a rip-off of a previous plot device and nothing more. Turns out the coroner was a former Jigsaw victim who ended up surviving and helping him (like basically everyone else) who was trying to bring down the corrupt cop or something. I don't know, I literally pushed the memories of most of this movie out of my brain to make room for a doctor's appointment.
Aside from the self-plagiarism, there are some hilarious and horrible leaps of faith regarding logic required. John Kramer suddenly having remorse mid-game for the person who accidentally mixed up his x-rays and leaping in to save him? That person then becoming his little apprentice without question (again)? The copy-cat drugging and killing a survivor in hospital, moving the body undetected to a cemetery, digging up Jigsaw's grave, placing the fresh corpse in the coffin, re-burying it without a single hint of disturbance, all in one night? The directors claiming they weren't interested in making a torture porn movie within the God-damned Saw franchise? That's it, I'm done.
Jigsaw is the equivalent of a clip show on a sitcom. They've dragged a bunch of ideas out of the previous seven outings, mashed them together with some lack-lustre traps and spun a convoluted time distortion into the mix in the hope that it sticks. Horrible toss.
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