Saw
3
Genres: Horror
Let's
get this out in the open right now. Thanks to bootlegged
Faces of
Death films, I have videotapes of drowned Asian men being fished
out of reservoirs. Don't ask me how or why, but the point I'm trying
to make is that I'm not a squeamish person. Nor, apparently, am I a
particularly moral one. Still, I find the
Saw films
distasteful. And it's not because they're particularly gory or
violent, or that they're mean spirited. They are, but I have no
problem with that. It's that this mean spiritedness is given this
veneer, this mask, of Biblical morality that's all the more sickening
because there's not a hint of irony present. Like all slasher films,
the
Saw movies turn their villain into the hero, but instead
of being open and honest about it, reveling in Freddie Krueger's one-
liners, or Michael Myers' stoic inexorability, the film is
disingenuous. Jigsaw,
Saw’s anti-hero, is driven by the same
moral outrage that drove the killer in
Se7en, but without the
complexity that film layered on the motivation. Jigsaw kills people
because they sin, essentially, and this morally problematic stance is
given about the same amount of attention the key grip gets in the
credits. It's merely an excuse to torture people while hiding behind
a facade of puritanism. It’s not that I find the morality of the
film objectionable, I just find it absent, and what's there is
confused and muddled. In the last film, Jigsaw punished a cop who
planted evidence to send criminals to jail. But strangely, he
also attacked the criminals that were framed, because
they were guilty of the crimes they were framed for. This reasoning
goes around in circles so fast it makes my head hurt, and coupled
with the nausea the film's green and brown color scheme induces,
these movies feel like the stomach flu.
Saw
3 , as per the law of diminishing returns, is the worst of the
series thus far. Where the first film was at least inventive in its
brutality, and
Saw 2 struggled not to degenerate into random
neural firings of nonsense, both films had moments of pure, abject
repulsion amid the stupidity, like high school drop-outs puking
worms.
Saw 3, however, has no redeeming qualities. The same
confused moral tone exists, amplified somewhat by an additional layer
of idiotic plot twists, but everything else is more subdued. And
without distractions like gore and cruelty, there's nothing to draw
your attention away from the fact that nothing makes any sense. The
film quickly dispenses with any of the characters still surviving
from the last film, then moves on to the usual parade of elaborate
torture devices. Jigsaw, who has been dying since the first film,
here prolongs his agony (and ours), by running another set of victims
through another series of improbably tests. As he gets older and the
filmmakers get lazier, the crimes against life his victims commit are
getting more and more trivial, like jaywalking and wearing two
different kinds of thread. Jigsaw has taken an apprentice in this
film, one of the victims from the original, which is for some reason
intended to be a surprise, despite the fact that this was established
in
Saw 2. She helps Jigsaw kidnap a doctor to save him,
helping fill the spaces between various reasonably grisly deaths, and
all building up to a shocking twist ending that's only unpredictable
because everyone stops caring 20 minutes into the picture.
For
all my distaste for the series, director Darren Lynn Bousman, who
made the last two films, managed to inject a certain tension in the
last film. Not so here, where everything goes slack and lazy after
about 20 minutes, and not even the promise of someone getting drowned
in rotting pig offal is enough to sustain interest. The performances
are essentially treading water, wasting time until the next set-piece
arrives to distract from a terribly trite script, but that
distraction never really arrives. Much lazier than the previous
movies,
Saw 3 relies too much on the laurels of its
predecessors, and these laurels are as decayed and diseased as the
film's sickly green set design, and the moral universe the film
inhabits.