Jigsaw Movie Review
Set more than ten years after the death of John Kramer, aka notorious serial killer "Jigsaw", this movie finds a new group of strangers navigating through various deadly traps; meanwhile, a dirty cop (Callum Keith Rennie, Memento), a clean cop (Cle Bennett from Urban Legend), a forensic pathologist (Matt Passmore), and his assistant--and Jigsaw fangirl--Eleanor Bonneville (Hannah Emily Anderson) try to unravel the mystery/become the main suspects. The movie starts out with a criminal using a remote device to start the game--we then see a group of five strangers playing the first part of said game.
I'd use a Buckethead joke here, but the movie already did...over and over again
As the movie moves along, we get what you would expect from a Saw film--lots of traps, blood, and death scenes, but these generally do not come close to the gore or, more importantly, the originality of most from the previous films. The general theme here is confessing your sins, and the people in the traps have a very difficult time doing this--naturally, the results are horrific. So as the four main characters outside the traps try to figure out how Kramer, who is long dead, can be behind everything happening (his blood is under a victim's nails, his voice is on a new tape, etc), the folks inside the traps are naturally terrified and have no idea what it happening--keep this in mind, and compare it to every single person who has been in these traps since the original film...this is perhaps the biggest clue of the twist--actually, lets just go ahead and skip to the twist ending. So we see the two remaining people from the initial trap in a room with John, while we also see two of the main characters from the outside now in traps themselves. One of the characters--well, I'm going full-blown spoiler here, so if you ignored the warning above and continued reading, this is your final warning.....still with me? Good. Okay, so Logan, the forensic pathologist, and Halloran, the crooked cop, are in traps that look like...well, they look like this...
Blinded by the light
These neck traps contain a laser that cuts sharper than anything else in the world, and to avoid them, each man has to admit his mistakes in life; Logan admits his, but is killed anyway. Halloran thinks he has won, but when his lasers light up and begin to move toward him, he spills the beans about letting killers, rapists, etc go free, including the man who killed Logan's wife. Suddenly, Logan stands, and explains he has been behind this the entire time--you see, he worked with John/Jigsaw after surviving the original buckethead game, and became John's FIRST pupil. The rest of the game we see throughout the movie was the original traps John had made, predating the original film, which is why we see John with the two survivors. The bodies Logan, Hallloran, and the others have been finding are so mangled that we, as the viewer, assume they are the people we are watching die as the movie progresses, but they are not--they are the bodies from Logan's duplication of what we are seeing. So half the movie is taking place in the present, while the other half is taking place ten years in the past.
Yeah...
So, okay, you got us...many didn't see this coming, but let us review why this twist ending fails, and lets begin with the timeline. They repeatedly make mention that John died ten years ago, but this throws off the entire timeline completely. If John had terminal brain cancer, and he connected with Logan as a result of Logan screwing up John's x-rays, and that's why Logan was in this at the beginning, this would have made their partnership begin eleven years ago...in reality, this would have had to have been AT LEAST fifteen years ago to fall in line with everything else we know about the series. Second, if Logan played such a large part of the genesis of this story, why is he NEVER mentioned in the first seven movies? Certainly John would have said something about him? Amanda would have been violently jealous of him? Detective Hoffman would have brought him up? None of this ever happened, making this twist terribly unbelievable and falling well short of the twist awesomeness we are used to from this franchise. Third, if you are paying even a little bit of attention to the scene when Logan and Halloran are in their traps, you will not be surprised when Logan stands--having just allegedly been killed by the most effective cutting tools in the world, Logan's head should have been obliterated, but when we see him fall to the ground, there is obviously no traumatic damage to his skull, so when he stands after Halloran admits his wrong-doing, it really isn't that surprising. Okay, with all that out of the way, and I realize this is called Quick Horror Movie Reviews and this one has been anything but quick, I will sum it up--Jigsaw is sort of like seeing a cover band in concert--it's close enough to the real thing that you can still enjoy it, but it's not quite on par with the original. When I reviewed Saw 3D, the movie that was supposed to wrap up the series, I said, quote, "To me, the end of the Saw series was about as perfect as could have been done, and as much as I love this series, I hope they do not make another one." I stand by this statement.
On A Scale Of One To Ten: 6
Jigsaw Movie Trailer
ADDITIONAL PERSONAL NOTE:
This was the first Saw movie I didn't see in the theatre, and I don't regret that decision. Here are links to my reviews of the other seven films from the series:
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