Film Review--Saw V

Saw V
directed by David Hackl
written by Patrick Melton, Marcus Dustan
starring Tobin Bell, Costas Mandylor, Scott Patterson, Meagan Good, Besty Russell, Julie Benz, Mark Rolston, Greg Bryk



It’s all about team work. After Jigsaw’s (Bell) untimely demise, his apprentice Mark Hoffman (Mandylor) takes up the reigns and seemingly enjoys unfettered terror porn access to the writhings of several subjects who are all connected to the deaths of eight people in the burning of what was supposed to be an empty warehouse. They are all guilty and we get to watch them have their comeuppance in a variety of ingenious ways that are presented with a curdled nonchalance.

There is absolutely no pretense to style in this film and since those in the lurch are shown each to have played their part in unnecessary carnage, it becomes a mere sport to watch them die. Their deaths have no meaning and the only discernible purpose for their ongoing abuse is for the audience to experience a vicarious thrill during their torments. That is the only reason films like this are made anymore. They serve no lasting purpose and only prove to irritate the senses into some sort of complicity to what is being done to the subjects at hand. It isn’t particularly eventful or edifying and there is only a threadbare plot to get in the way of all the bloodshed.

It’s difficult to rate this one against the others but suffice to say the main reason it fails to live up to the standards set before is it lacks the participation of Shawnee Smith as a major force in the film. She is truly the only legitimate reason to follow the franchise and without her there is nothing much to look at. The mere idea of a sexy young thing wreaking havoc and suffering the taunts and travails of pure unadulterated tortured male lust fantasies is worth the price of admission. Alas we are left with two bumbling men who try to outwit each other for no real purpose until the inevitable has run its course. The deaths are ultimately not particularly enjoyable as far as these things go. They lack the ribald edge that some of the earlier installments possessed and perhaps this is deliberate. After all, this isn’t the master’s work. It’s cheap, knock off material that only manage to tarnish the great one’s image.

Another failing in this film is that it kills off the only intriguing characters within a few minutes of introducing them. It leaves the audience with a cat and mouse game that is not worth getting worked up over. Simply put it doesn’t much matter what happens because the key actors are not engaging and do nothing to hold the audience’s interest. The film does include more of Jigsaw’s peculiar brand of justice although these sequences merely bog down what paltry story exists. They come across as filler that is only implemented to wait for the butcherings and for no other reason.

After a short while one becomes numb to scene after scene of inglorious torture. Although in this one there isn’t even much of that to nail down one’s attention. The deaths come too quick and the joys of the contraptions that made the earlier versions feel fresh and vital are completely lost. The brilliance of these earlier films lie in the many ingenious methods that Jigsaw devised to dispatch his victims. The pleasure was strictly in just how deviant they could be and in this one all of that is utterly abandoned. There is one interesting torture sequence at the beginning where a man is forced to make a choice between being sawed in half or having his hands crushed. He chooses the latter but pulls his hands back too soon and is sliced open anyway. It’s grisly for gore hounds and one of two particularly graphic demonstrations which ought to be why this sort of film exists in the first place.

Overall, this is a rather pedestrian effort in a franchise that appears to be running on empty. There is no story and the only thing that is left is to wait for the bodies to start falling. Perhaps there has never really been a story although some actors seem tailor made for this sort of thing and milk as much valor out of the material as they can. But this installment doesn’t seem to care about presenting anything worth watching and instead focuses entirely on presenting a series of poorly conceived torture scenes that serve no purpose in the end. Horror is genuinely best when it leaves things to the imagination and not when it ably shows the extreme level of violence it imagines its audiences are hungry for. Granted there is quite a following for this franchise and it will inevitably limp toward several other films but the audience seems to be waning although it is still a cash cow for Lionsgate.