Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on basement television.
I find myself exhausted by the Saw franchise. Don’t get me wrong; the first movie is genuinely good and unique in a lot of ways. It looks like it’s going to be a torture porn movie, but it is actually a disturbing psychological horror. From that first movie, though, the franchise has devolved into little more than excuses to put people in terrible situations and murder them for the thrill of the audience. That’s great if that’s all you want, but I get tired of it pretty quickly. So when Saw IV showed up on the They Shoot Zombies list, I knew eventually I’d have to dip my toes back into this particular sewage plant, and here we are.
If you’re unfamiliar with the basics of the franchise, the story is that a cancer patient named John Kramer (Tobin Bell), nicknamed Jigsaw, who finds people who he thinks no longer appreciate the gift of life that they have been given. He traps them and puts them into deathtraps where they have to fight to stay alive, typically having to go through something terribly painful (and often nasty) to survive. Those who live now have (he says) an appreciation for the life they have. Those who fail have a puzzle piece-shaped bit of skin removed from their body, representing that “missing piece” of the person—a survival instinct.
I’ll dive into the actual story of Saw IV in just a minute, but I want to address exactly what I think is the issue with the entire franchise. The first film, the one that establishes the idea of Jigsaw, presents us with a world where the character is creating something like a moral situation. People are forced to act to save their own lives, sometimes killing someone else to do so, or to take themselves to a place where they wouldn’t normally conceive of going. But everyone in his trials are guilty of something, mainly of taking their lives for granted. As we continue through the series, the tests that people are given become more and more vicious, and frequently they are tasked with doing something (or allowing something to happen) to someone entirely innocent. The moral structure that the entire series was based on initially is tossed into the trash specifically for the titillation of the audience.
Anyway, Saw IV presents us with the body of Jigsaw, who has evidently died from his cancer (a fact that will not prevent him from appearing in virtually all of the rest of the series). During his autopsy—not normally necessary for someone who is a known cancer patient—a microcassette is found in his stomach, coated in wax to prevent it from being damaged. On that cassette? A recording promising that his work will go on, something that sets Detective Hoffman (Costas Mandylor) to work.
The police discover the body of Detective Allison Kerry, who was killed in an unsolvable boobytrap in the previous film. We learn that also from the previous film, Detective Eric Matthews (Donnie Wahlberg) is still alive despite being missing for six months. This triggers Rigg (Lyriq Bent) to mount up an attempt to find him. Of course, Rigg is captured by Jigsaw or one of his agents, and put through a series of tests involving other people so that he can find Matthews, who is trapped in a different scenario, waiting for Rigg to find him. Honestly, the plot isn’t worth more detail than this.
But all of this does indicate exactly what went wrong with the Saw franchise. In the initial film, our main combatants in Jigsaw’s puzzle are a doctor and a photographer. Both of these men had simply lost their love of life and their will to do anything worthwhile. They weren’t specifically terrible people, but perhaps people who had moved to a more immoral (or amoral) life, no longer worrying or caring about doing anything useful or good in the world. In this film, the people who are put in peril for the most part are outright criminals—sex traffickers, rapists, and the like. These aren’t people who need to be redeemed, but people who are being put into these positions because the audience wants to see them tortured and killed.
We’re also not given explanations of many of these people. In the opening, two men are connected to a machine that will kill one or both of them if they can’t figure out how to stop it or work together. Do we know anything about them? No. Are we told? No. We’re just left to assume that they somehow deserve this treatment. Saw has moved from looking like torture porn but actually being a dark and intelligent psychological thriller to just being torture porn.
I’ve been told that Saw X is a return to form for the series (because Spiral certainly wasn’t). I assume that someday it’s going to show up on the They Shoot Zombies list, and when it does, I will watch it. Until then, though, I am hopeful that the Saw movies I haven’t seen: Saw V, Saw VI, Saw 3D, and Jigsaw, will remain unlisted and I won’t have to deal with them.
Why to watch Saw IV: You’ve come this far; you might as well continue.
Why not to watch: The sunk cost fallacy.