Prior to it, I didn’t see any of the Saw franchise’s movies. This made my experience a bit disjointed. If you would have asked me about this movie series before watching it, I could only tell you that Jigsaw had a guy named Tobin Bell as its main villain and that he created elaborate death traps. Beyond that I wouldn’t be able to say anything else about characters or plot before or even after seeing Saw 3. Not at all. Immediately the film started, it dawned on me that some of these characters were meant to be familiar to me. It was strange because no new faces were introduced; thus, I presumed them new ones. Therefore, who were the ongoing series characters and who had just been brought in for killing kept bothering me throughout?
Saw 3 starts abruptly without any background information. There is a man in a dirty, grimy bathroom that is dark. He mutilates himself to get out of the many cruel contraptions that surround him. It’s unclear who he is or why he was there, but in the end he fails and dies horribly. But I just don’t know if this death is supposed to be important. Jigsaw finally appears; he’s ill and lying on a bed inside his hidden hospital/workshop room. Jigsaw’s apprentice is Amanda, I think she was the lady in the trailer for the first Saw movie who had an apparatus strapped on her head. Is this when or even after? At some point there are flashbacks… or maybe they are flashforwards which show her with this shorter haircut and things look different. In addition during some of these events Jigsaw is seen alive and well suggesting that he only pretended to die. So people believed Jigsaw was dead from another movie and it turns out that it was another fictionalized episode?
Lynn, who is a talented doctor has been kidnapped by Amanda on behalf of Jigsaw who wants her to remove his brain tumor. This woman seems to be disliked by Amanda though.
Next is Jeff who feels completely disconnected from everything else except for knowing that he is being subjected to one of Jigsaw’s tests, which revolve around his son being killed by a drunk/reckless driver and he has to decide whether the people involved in it should live or die. At the end of the movie, I can sense that the filmmakers wanted me to say, “Whoa! Is that…? Holy shit!” but it was just all too ridiculous for me to call Saw 3 anything other than an incoherent mess.
Saw 3: Beyond Looking like a Feature Length Korn Music Video:
Another media piece made by Leigh Whannell, who is also known as co creator of this sequel and Insidious.
I don’t get how Whannell still continues getting gigs in horror because I have never found anything he wrote scary at all.
However, this film does have more action & violence per second than any other films I’ve seen lately.
One review I read said this could be the most gory and violent of them all; I definitely agree with that statement. On paper there is hardly any reason behind such violence here.
So Jigsaw kills people he thinks deserve it? They have sinned against another human being a lot of times and therefore have to do things that cause them extreme pain. But, Jigsaw seems to want to screw everyone over, regardless of what they pick. Some of the reasons presented by our villain for his victims in this particular movie seem pushed too much. Lynn on the other hand has suddenly been informed that she is being tested because of some rather trivial reasons. It was as if the writers needed her to be captured so she couldn’t escape, so they just invented some excuses why she’s “bad.”
In the above mentioned segment I said something about editing but let me also stress out how much this movie terribly sucks at editing cuts. There are so many swipes and slashes while people are mid-conversation. And then you insert flashbacks (I think) where the characters suddenly look slightly different and are in a different location. My take is that this kind of very rapidly-paced cutting creates an anxiety that younger viewers misinterpret as true horrifying fear. When you look closer, it’s simply what happens when lights flash and there are loud noises.
There is a level of self-awareness in the Saw series that may seem clever when you see how Jigsaw’s dialogue is written. However, these come off as if they were conceived by an eighth grader trying to be profound and cool in their thoughts. Eventually, the novelty wears off, making violence more disgusting than exciting. The excuses sound like someone trying to justify the most awkward conversation ever put to film. Each grown-up character presented here is shown in his or her dumbest possible incarnation compared with people who hold such jobs in real life. Those police officers are stupider than actual police officers. Rather than actors showing emotions through words, there’s much screaming.
I don’t think I’ll ever watch another movie from this franchise willingly. This one was not my choice; it was selected by a viewer at random. Only this way would I even try them again, but only if cashed out for that matter. It’s quite sad that such a huge cultural impact was made by this franchise all together. Yet it makes sense why it did this way after all. Similarly idiotic Friday the 13th went down these same empty clichés with new victims being introduced each time and some of the sloppiest lore in existence being played about therein its movies. For those of you who love saw movies, well then good luck with your life!
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