K-SCORE: 42
Directors: James Wan, Darren Lynn Bousman, David Hackl, Kevin Greutert
Writers: James Wan, Leigh Whannel, Thomas Fenton, Patrick Melton, Marcus Dunstan,
Starring: Tobin Bell, Shawnee Smith, Costas Mandylor, Betsy Russell, Cary Elwes, Danny Glover, Donnie Wahlberg, Scott Patterson, ever more fleshy sacks of screaming trap fodder
Spoiler Level: Moderate
In preparation for the 2017 release of the film Jigsaw, a continuation of the Saw franchise that occurs after a film called Saw: The Final Chapter, I’ve rewatched all the films. Now you don’t have to! Don’t say I never gave you anything.
These films are strange, and not the way you think. You might consider it odd that not one, but five different writers embraced the sicker depths of their imaginations to consider just how gruesome someone’s self-inflicted torture could be right before their brutal dismemberment at the hands of a heinous trap. It’s odd, but I guess popular. What’s actually really weird: these writers have no talent for creating likable, compelling, or even remotely memorable characters yet have an unflinching devotion to said characters, plunging into the minutia of their backstories even two, three, four films after they’ve been turned into headless, armless, dickless, masses of cooked, minced, acid-drenched, frozen, smashed, torn, and otherwise mutilated corpses. How much interest and intrigue do dead people bring new narratives? How much can dead people do in a developing plot? If you, like me, conclude: not much, then it might lead you to my final question: why are these writers doing this? I believe I have the answer.
John Kramer, aka Jigsaw, starts out seemingly dead, has cancer, needs brain surgery he doesn’t get in Saw III, and dies in the same film. He then appears in flashbacks in every single other film and leaves postmortem tapes, seemingly omniscient from beyond the grave, that put other characters in more of his traps. Amanda Young, one of his many apprentices escapes a trap in Saw II, fails Jigsaw’s subsequent tests to see if she can adequately entrap others, and dies in Saw III. She finally stops showing up after Saw VI. The three other victims of the first Saw film are chained to pipes, starve, have their legs cut off, and are beaten to death with toilet bowl lids, and make the credits in two films, four films, and four films. There’s a detective, Eric Matthews, who has a hell of a RAP (Record of Aches and Pains?) sheet by the end who is locked in a room without food or water to die at the end of Saw II, forced to break his own foot, advance through a series of traps victimizing others in Saw III, beaten to death in that film, and awoken in Saw IV only to have his head crushed between two large blocks of ice. He’s also in Saw V. Next to him is a man credited in Saw III as “forensic officer” who gets a name, Mark Hoffman, in Saw IV where he seemingly dies to a horrible trap. From there he goes on to become the second most important character in the series, aiding a long dead Jigsaw in much the same way the pink robot body aids Krang in The Ninja Turtles. A reverse bear trap blows up part of his face in Saw VI, he’s locked in the starvation room of pipes in Saw VII: The Final Chapter, which, if I know anything about this series, means he’ll apparently die in Saw VIII, be revealed as the secret villain again in Saw IX, actually die in Saw X, take a hiatus in Saw XI, and then finally make his last appearance after a revelatory flashback in Saw XII: The Final Final Chapter (We’re Serious This Time.) There’s an ER doctor / wife of Eric Matthews who has her head blown to bits by a shotgun necklace in the same film she’s introduced. The actress appeared on set to film four films, III through VI, that meaty part of the curve. All of these characters and many more have husbands and wives, friends, coworkers, secretaries, partners in crime, fellow heroin addicts, and so on, any one of whom is initially there only to expound upon why said characters are being tested but then end up getting tested themselves.
“writers have to stop naming their characters by Googling “most common American names,””
These are apparently different guys.
Another crucial element to this character insanity, is just how poorly written and acted these characters are. Detective Mark Hoffman, the Krang body, has the emotional range of a cinderblock that a death row inmate painted a face on with his own blood. Jigsaw’s wife, Jill Tuck, spends five films being mildly agitated before being scared and hiding like an 80s slasher horror bimbo from her will-be killer. She’s so uncharismatic that, even after watching all this shit and having them repeat her name a hundred times, even after my brother telling me her name while he remarked on the franchise’s flaws, I had to look it up to write this paragraph. And, I hate to beat a dead horse, but writers have to stop naming their characters by Googling “most common American names,” and then picking them from a hat. The franchise has John, Amanda, Mark, Jill, Lawrence, Adam, David, Steven, Eric, Allison, Daniel, Jeff, Peter, another Daniel, Dan, Lynn, Bobby, Matt, William, and Xavier (an ethnic drug dealer I actually remember.) I’ll periodically complain that a story is hard to enjoy because none of the characters have likable qualities so there’s little stakes in the conflict for me, it’s hard to care, but Saw really takes this to a whole other level. For one thing, all of the characters are either serial killers or people so evil that a misguided serial killer believing in his own self-righteousness decides they need to be put through a horrific torture device so as to be either vindicated by excruciating pain or killed. For another thing, as I mentioned previously, most of the characters are already dead. So it’s really hard to get attached to these people that the franchise is so obsessed with. And the writers tend to use the same type of person: middle aged, upper-middle class, usually white, locally relevant but otherwise irrelevant, arrogant, douchebags. They tend to have jobs first graders think of when they think of adulthood: doctor, lawyer, cop. All victims have to be over a certain age so the content isn’t purely amoral and have to be under a certain age so it’s conceivable that they could perform physically within the trap. The acting is usually as bad as the writing, which is not surprising since most of these people started their careers as extras in previous Saw films.
But I’ve figured it out. The degradation of the franchise to where it exists now as well as the future badness of further entries is ensured. The first film is good. It’s claustrophobic, horrific, but interesting, sickening, but in an understandable way with a wickedly cool twist showing a character to be something other than what you thought they were while dispatching of the others. Because of this film, the creators, (whoever the producers appoint on any given day to do the menial task of writing the script), have all decided the series’s success hinges on four separate elements. 1) A twist in who the serial killer is and who he’s killing. 2) That the killings be in the form of a trap designed to bodily harm people as a test of their will to survive and thereby vindicate their evil deeds. 3) That these people try to get out of the trap, harm themselves, harm others, and ultimately fail, thereby ensuring the worst case scenario of all of torture, failure, and death. 4) That the characters testing and being tested, trapping and entrapped, be connected to each other on a personal level. It’s all in Saw. It’s all in Saw II. It all will be in Saw XIII: Psyche, We’re not Done Yet. But don’t you see?! If you follow all those rules, you have to introduce new characters tangentially connected to the entrapped, make them killers, trap them, make them suffer, kill them, introduce new characters to connect to them, torture those new characters, make them into killers, and so on forever. All the while the likelihood of Jigsaw having the foresight to record tapes for all these people that accurately describe their sins and current trap puzzle decreases, and the movies get stupider. Plus, to remind everybody of all the backstories and connections becomes a more arduous task, and a larger and larger percentage of the current movie becomes a flashback. Saw VII sits at about 40% flashback. Saw XVIII will be 95% flashback, and one guy in that basement room from the first one, being tortured just by having to listen to fifty-seven Jigsaw tapes, trying to piece it all together. There is no escape from this cycle.
The Saw franchise is, itself, a giant trap from which the writers cannot escape. They’re being tortured, struggling to make as many films as they can within the time limit before the producers sell the rights, knowing the inevitability of the series’s demise, but fighting through the pain just the same. The only escape is for all of us to come to terms with their sins, stop watching, and let Saw die. Thus, I’m really looking forward to the next one. Strap on your pig masks you soulless Hollywood tricycling clowns because I want to play a game.
“franchise is, itself, a giant trap ”
