Saw V Review

I wrote this because I wanted something to feel like I'm better/smarter than and a misguided horror movie drunk on its own success that I got dragged to was the most convenient choice. I think if I was strapped to a crazy-Saw-machine my message from Jigsaw (or one of his fucking Manson Family of surrogates) would sound something like, "Stefan, you take cheap shots at films that are already obviously bad to make up for your own haunting fears of artistic inferiority..."

Gosh everyone just wants to be an evil genius' dark pupil nowadays. Apparently even the most basic of dirges can inspire the will to orchestrate the elaborate deaths of other shady characters. And they're such quick studies. The precision engineering required (demanding expertise in, I dunno, metallurgy, electronics and advanced physics for these Hi-Fi Morton's-Fork gymnasiums to perform as resolutely as they have...every time...without a single glitch) is no longer just the province of Jigsaw and his decades of mechanical experience, but can be mastered in a matter of days with his, like, Infernal Devices For Dummies crash course. It's D.I.Y. Evil Geniousness! Now anyone can play – even the less cerebral, charismatic and generally interesting characters like Hoffman and that Amanda girl. (Of course who knows how long Hoffman was honing his craft as the Saw franchise's stock-in-trade involves not letting the viewer know when, chronologically, certain sequences are occurring so that later they can, like, blow your mind with revelations that certain things happened before/after others or maybe even...whoa...at the same time!)

But if only such regard was lent to the intricacies of human psychology. Although Jigsaw claims that the most enlightened path to clarity and salvation is being strapped to a large machine that wants to hurt you (his method is now referred to in textbooks as “Shlock Therapy”), then please first consider what percentage of these subjects have actually survived the Jigsaw/Hoffman/Amanda Rehabilitation Center. (Hint: It's even less than the latest film's Rotten Tomatoes rating). And yet Jigsaw seems to think the character's inevitable failures are moral ones. Those ignorant fools, not heeding the geniousy wisdom of their insane, sadistic captor who is submitting them to dehumanizingly morbid dilemmas. Hmmmm maybe his subjects fail to exact Mensa-like logistics skills and oceans of human empathy because they're put in opaque, high pressure situations with no previous warning and no way out. Yes, if you dangle a room full of strangers over impending death with a claustrophic deficit of information and...well...options for survival then, yes, they might act irrationally in the name of self-preservation. What another earth-shaking Saw-series revelation: the dark side of humanity can in fact be unlocked through ruthless physical and mental torment.

This pretense of Jigsaw's dilemmas as “morality experiments” (rather than, say, pressure cookers of animal fear) not only drains the character of his sinister mystique, but reveals him as not-quite-geniousy-enough to realize his own hypocrisy: i.e. things are not experiments if you know already know what's going to happen (“hmmm, yes, it seems that, once again, when human beings have their lives threatened, they will panic and make rash rather than clever and charitable decisions”). After all, these are situations designed to summon the basest instincts in people so that they kill each other. It's like putting two fighting fish in a bowl and calling yourself a marine biologist.

As well-documented as my hate for Wolf Creek and Hostel are, I can now only admire their forthcoming nature. They at least don't pretend like they're about something more than watching people get eviscerated. And although they're movies I want to put in a torture machine that cuts 90% of the footage due to its boring and meaningless nature, I have a different re-edit in mind for Saw. I won't take a single thing out (not even the deluge of unnecessary shot repetitions of something scary or gory or a character being like “whoa!”). I'll just put all of the events in chronological order. I promise you it will put the “sad” back into “sadistic.” It will be my own Douglas Gordon homage. All that veils this film's aesthetic are the “surprise” revelations of a human motive behind its endless pageant of torture sequences (which, by the way, are not improving in stakes, cleverness, intensity, creativity, or even perversity). So relieved are we that the flailing electrical wires of discontinuity have been mended that we don't acknowledge how feebly the “moral” animus of the film's villains are stitched in. Anything to justify the gore I guess.

The thing with Saw is that, for a horror film, it has a very effective basic gore-delivery formula: rather than having the bad guy do all the maiming, why not force the characters to do it to themselves. What's more horrifying than that, really? Well I'll tell you: a half-assed writer. The pointless narrative contortions are more vulgar than any mangling of the body that Jigsaw can conjure. And the continual Shakespearean downfalls (a more suitable illustration probably being “lateral crunchings”) of the protagonists (by the way a Saw protagonist = whoever has not yet been spectactularly killed) persist without the vital components, i.e. actual fucking characters. They're not complex enough to have tragic flaws or really any semblance of a human feature that justifies their failure. But apparently everyone has to die. Gotta get bums in those seats, rusty as the torture-machine-variety have to be, traditionally speaking.

Real elevation of stakes began in Saw four where the complex-mechanism-aestheti

c began to be applied to a greater narrative. In Saw 5 this device is just as counter-productive as ever. Rather than making the story more intricate, it simply magnifies its hollowness, baring its spookily-rust-stained gears. You see normally, if a character wants to do the right thing, what would thwart them is an inherent wrong thing in their methods, motives, desires, etc. Saw's pathos mechanisms are literally such: a series of pulleys and triggers that create a needlessly adversarial causality. The narrative Morality isn't thwarted by its own built-in inadequacies, it's thwarted by a big steel version of the Mousetrap boardgame (or those things that were popular circa late 80's early 90's in Honey I Shrunk The Kids or Goonies that made toast or granted people entry to your front yard). After all, it is all a game...and I'm bored. The Saw series is, narratively, guerilla tactics for the sake of it. And the result is cheap, feeling not as though the victims were soldiers of the thriller genre, but unfortunate children chasing their balls across the street. And it's getting tedious, its over-the-topness as clunky and insultingly deliberate as my closing sentence will be. Sorry, but all the frenetic editing and relentless sensory assaults of spectral audio eeriness amidst one oxidation-rashed post-industrial dungeon after another is not going to save this septology from its own infernal self-mutilation.