I Saw The Sign

Year: 2006

Director: Darren Lynn Bousman

Cast: Tobin Bell, Shawnee Smith, Angus Macfadyen

Run Time: 1 hour 48 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Well, Halloween is over, but the sheer amount of movies I watched at the end of October will give us an extra week of celebration as I get through those reviews during this first week of November. Not that it's not Halloween all year over here anyway, but it's still nice and festive. And what better movie to kick off our post-holiday candy buzz than Saw III, the second sequel spawned from James Wan's unexpectedly massive indie hit. 

The franchise was a staple of the October season for nearly an entire decade, a decade in which I avoided the Saw films like chocolate-covered broccoli. I'm currently seeking reparation for that period of my life by marathoning all seven of the godforsaken things. I had a brief hiatus after summer ended because, hey, homework has precedence over torture films. It's a strange world we live in. But I'm back now and better than ever! Unfortunately the Saw films are only getting worse, so it will take all the strength I can muster to sally forth and reach the finish line.

But right now we have Saw III. Still early enough in the franchise that original screenwriter Leigh Whannell is sticking to his duties like a particularly tough strain of mildew. Saw II director Darren Lynn Bousman also reprises his duties here (as he would with the next year's Saw IV - this man put food on the table for three years by finding new ways to tear flesh apart), so if anything, at least the film has a consistent direction with the first and second films. 

That direction is directly into the toilet, but at least it still has its integrity.

This is the only franchise where this image and that word can be paired together without irony.

The film opens with a perfunctory coda following up on the status of Detective Eric Matthews (Donnie Wahlberg) and his partner Kerry (Dina Meyer) - spoiler alert: it involves a lot of blood - but the bulk of the action revolves around two storylines that have heck-all to do with the events of Saw II. So that's fun. Or it would be, if distancing itself from Saw II didn't mean detaching the tether to the last good entry in the franchise.

The plot - and with each subsequent entry the strain on that word goes stronger - revolves around the ailing Jigsaw's (Tobin Bell) final test. His accomplice Amanda (Shawnee Smith) has rigged it so that if his heart rate drops to zero, the kidnapped Dr. Lynn Denlon (Bahar Soomekh) will be destroyed by an explosive device around her neck. Her task is to keep him alive until after the test is complete, the subject in question being Jeff (Angus Macfadyen), a man whose life is fueled by grief and vengeance after his son is killed in a drunk driving accident. Through a series of gory tests he must learn to forgive the people responsible and move on with his life.

Or he could stand around dilly-dallying and being a useless waffle while the few people he actively decides to save die off anyway because he's too much of a stubborn asshole to respect other people's humanity, even though saving them would do little harm to himself. Perhaps you could extrapolate from that marvelously veiled and subtle sentence, but none of the characters in Saw III are particularly likable, especially this dillhole who leaves a trail of unnecessary carnage in his wake like a chainsaw made of sharks.

If only I could find a key to unlock this poor woman who is freezing to death. Like this one in my hand. Oh well, she's probably dead already anyway, it's not like I should bother about hurrying or anything. I'm just a loser who whines about his son while multiple human beings are flayed before my eyes. I hope someday people write blog posts about me to commemorate my heroism.

With such a toxic protagonist, it would be helpful if the film had a moral sticking point anywhere to be seen, but alas this is the third film in a franchise, so it's already crossed the line where the villains have become the main characters. Everybody else in the film is just a poorly acted, amoral sack of meat whose opinions, feelings, and aspirations couldn't matter less. They're just there as soulless fodder for the incredibly pornographic gore sequences (of which this film has so many slots to fill, it even included a surgery scene in amid the trappy festivities) - making this the first in the series to truly tip the scales into that most dour of genres: torture porn.

The traps are clever enough as devices with which to marvel at humanity's ingenuity and capacity for cruelty, but gone are even the tenuous links to character development present in the first two films. In lieu of actual human beings, the Saw aesthetic is honed and weaponized and becomes a character far more nuanced and present than anybody else in the entire film. The grimness sets in like a rot - every light that can possibly be tinged green is poured onto the set in a pile (turning everything the color of mucus that has been urinated on), the dubstep-video editing turns itself all the way up to the Skrillex level, and the production design combines all the best elements from all the highest quality dingy warehouses from the Dingy Warehouse Warehouse. The fact that this is the longest film in the franchise means that this cheery atmosphere is jammed into your skull again and again like a rusty jackhammer.

The filthy, low res video charms the eye with its grain the size of actual grain on the side of a Nebraska highway while the ear is delicately tickled with the splintery wood of Whannell's dialogue. I'd prefer not to think about Jigsaw mentioning that he will "sentence" a judge's soul to hell, so I'll divert attention by mentioning that a second act confrontation (and another in the third) devolves into a repetitive shriek circle not entirely unlike that scene in Rocky Horror where they all shout "Janet! Brad! Rocky! Dr. Scott!" on loop. There's a flashback that unnecessarily re-explains the context of the original Saw in a way that actually makes that film less interesting, a mystery in the first act that is easily solvable by anybody who was awake while watching Saw II, and the villains vacillate between Rube Goldbergian pre-planning and Barney Fifish vacuity. I mean, they actually challenge a doctor to keep a late stage terminal cancer patient alive with not much more than a set of Operation prongs and a handful of aspirin.

And yet their isolated warehouse/medieval torture device budget is alarmingly high.

But hey, it's not all bad. There's always at least one thing to redeem a movie (unless it's The Outing but the less we talk about that film that happier I'll be with my life) and the Saw films were big studio pictures so you can assume at least one professional was hanging out on set, maybe by the crafty table somewhere.

There is exactly one good scare involving a TV screen displaying a camera readout from a jarring angle. Unfortunately it follows a truly execrable mirror scare, but this is 2000's horror. You take the good with the bad. The most consistently valuable element of the film is the performance of both of the villains. Tobin Bell is always reliable as the ragged and angry Jigsaw, but Shawnee Smith really gets a chance to show off her chops with a much meatier role for Amanda. The character is still an obnoxious psycho, but Smith justifies her actions with a solid core of emotion that I'm grateful was there. 

Smith is the film's anchor, preventing it from straying too far from the Saw universe even while it wildly careens in terms of quality. Saw III is never at any point a good movie, but thanks to the increased screen time of the only two talented actors in the entire wretched enterprise, there is a kernel of merit to watching that keeps me at least halfheartedly on the hook for Saw IV. And that's the most I can wring from my motivation, but it will have to be enough.

Saw III, guys.

TL;DR: Saw III is not very good, nosiree-bob.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1415

Reviews In This Series

Saw (Wan, 2004)
Saw II (Bousman, 2005)
Saw III (Bousman, 2006)
Saw IV (Bousman, 2007)
Saw V (Hackl, 2008)
Saw VI (Greutert, 2009)
Saw: The Final Chapter (Greutert, 2010)

Fright Flashback: Do You Saw What I Saw?

Welcome to Fright Flashback, where every week until the end of summer we will revisit an older horror film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to an upcoming new release. This week we are anticipating The Purge: Anarchy, a sequel which promises to expand the universe of the small scope / low budget original in the hopes of transforming it into a franchise. In celebration, today's review is Saw II, a 2005 sequel which accomplished exactly that.

Year: 2005

Director: Darren Lynn Bousman

Cast: Donnie Wahlberg, Beverley Mitchell, Franky G

Run Time: 1 hour 33 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I've gotta say, binge-watching a long gone film franchise without any real foreknowledge of its contents is a magical experience. I'm a big fan of watching a prominent franchise derail itself (as such, I am the only human in recorded history who enjoyed Paranormal Activity 4 on any level), so I'm excited to get through all the Saw films, but so far I've been enjoying myself immensely in a mostly positive manner.

When Lionsgate released James Wan's Saw upon America in 2004, nobody was expecting the one million dollar film to gross a staggering 55 times its budget in domestic sales alone. As any self-respecting production company would do, they upped the budget to four million (still keeping it relatively low - that kind of profit margin doesn't just roll around every day) and rolled out a bigger and badder sequel in the hopes that the fans would just keep pouring money down the chute.

Evidently it worked, because Saw II made 40 million more than Saw's already astronomical box office, kicking off a yearly tradition that would continue on until Saw 3D, the seventh and, as of the time of this writing, final film in the series. I'll be able to have more insight once I reach the end of this marathon, but something tells me that this is one franchise that can't be called extinct yet, merely dormant. 

We in the horror community know that the word "Final" is about as reliable as an airport ETA, and this franchise was still a wishing well of cash by the time it was canned, the last entry having made roughly the cost of Donald Trump's bathroom. But it's been nothing but radio silence for four years. I'm sure Lionsgate is waiting in the shadows, cooking up something dastardly.

I hope to Jigsaw it's not a remake.

Now, it is typical for sequels to popular films to attempt to do the exact same thing... only bigger. This film is no different. In fact it's a dictionary example of the form. Saw II features four times the amount of victims, eight times the locations, and an insurmountably high number times the embarrassingly wooden lines of dialogue. This was in large part thanks to Leigh Whannell's continuation of the script without the guiding presence of frequent collaborator James Wan, but more on that later.

For now, the traps. I would say "plot", but this is a Saw movie. Let's not put on airs. I don't need to be distracted while attempting to reduce this enormously convoluted plot to a bare bones summary. Alright. It's go time. Detective Eric Mathews (Donnie Wahlberg) is a corrupt cop who's estranged from his wife and son because he slept with Allison (Dina Meyer, one of three returning cast members), one of his coworkers and an expert on the Jigsaw case.

He's finally cornered Jigsaw (the indispensible Tobin Bell) in an abandoned steel factory with the help of a SWAT team. Just as everything is going well, they discover a set of monitors watching over the serial killer's newest morality trap. While the police hurry to trace the source of the video, the eight victims must work together to find a way out lest the poison gas being pumped into the house they're in rip them apart from the inside.

These victims are numerous, but only a few are important. There's Amanda (Shawnee Smith), the only woman to have previously survived a Jigsaw game; Daniel (Erik Knudsen), Detective Wahlberg's son; and Xavier (Franky G) a macho and violent drug dealer who puts himself above all others. Jigsaw gives these eight people a tape recorder and several clues toward assuring their survival, some hideously obvious yet ignored by the victims at large, and some staggeringly perplexing that the characters seem to have no problem with.

Saw's internal logic is as free-flowing as the blood.

The rapidly diminishing victims explore the house and find a series of new traps and games that push the limits of their humanity, either to find an exit or to obtain antidotes to the poison coursing through their veins. It was immediately obvious that Saw II would be bloodier than its predecessor, and while the gore is still more subdued than the implications (no studio would want to scare off audiences by being too brutal - gorehounds are abundant, but absolutely a minority), there are plenty of cringe moments, especially those revolving around the ever-present hypodermic needles that contain the medicine.

The traps are still pretty compelling this time around, not yet devolving into the more indecent realms of "torture porn." Oh, it could certainly be considered a member of the genre but at least the gore is servicing a sort of intensity and sense of purpose, raising the stakes of the situation and providing character momentum. Something tells me that those elements will vanish with Whannell, daft screenwriter though he may be (at least at this point in his career).

Sorry man, I liked Insidious.

The greatest flaws of Saw II can be traced back to the script, although the acting is just as terrible as always (except Tobin Bell, the film's saving grace as a defeated and angry cancer patient, a role much expanded from his original purpose as a crackerjack twist ending). Eric has a flashback to something that happened mere minutes before, Jigsaw's plot this time around involves a Joker-esque level of pre-planning and psychic abilities, and there are too many characters this time around to provide an adequate backstory for any of them.

This film is full of potential energy. You can feel a rich story pulsing beneath the surface (one that is hopefully expanded upon in the increasingly intricate network of sequels), but barely any of it comes out on screen. This is likely because the script itself is adapted from an entirely different story written by Darren Lynn Bousman years before and spruced up with Sawisms by Whannell. The resulting film is a Frankenstein monster of sawed-off backstory and dialogue that could build an ark.

I'm saying it's wooden, is what I'm saying.

But despite all its flaws (many of which it shares with the film that came before - so maybe this can just be considered a hallmark of the franchise) and some of the later twists and turns that kept me up at night poking at plotholes and worrying about the inconsistent MO of a fictional serial killer, it's all part of the ride. Saw II is a roller coaster, a gory, tense and cool film that drags you along with it for the entirety of the run time, only exposing its flaws after you've had a chance to sit down afterward and reflect.

Any dead space in the film would have allowed that moment of realization to come much earlier, so it's a great compliment to say that it has no such moment. And even in the wake of the closing credits, realizing its flaws doesn't ruin the film, it merely knocks it down a couple of notches. Saw II is still a great, fun sequel maintaining the themes established by the first Saw and opening up a universe of possibilities for the next.

TL;DR: Saw II is a good and entertaining sequel, but it falls apart at the script level.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1317

Reviews In This Series

Saw (Wan, 2004)
Saw II (Bousman, 2005)

Saw III (Bousman, 2006)

Saw IV (Bousman, 2007)

Saw V (Hackl, 2008)

Saw VI (Greutert, 2009)

Saw: The Final Chapter (Greutert, 2010)