saw 3

saw 3 is an exercise in tedious regurgitation of vomit, blood, and fucked up traps. oh, there’s a story in there too, but really, who cares? it’s all about the killing.

the basic premise is that a serial killer, jigsaw, takes people who he believes that are wasting their lives and he puts them into torture traps. he gives them a short period of time, usually one minute, to escape. usually the escape requires the victim to put themselves into even more physical pain in order to get out. the goal is to teach the victim a lesson should they survive, which is that your life is precious and that you should live it to the fullest. think of it as one of those public service announcements if satan was the producer. and why does jigsaw have such a hardon for seeing people see the bright side of life? because he’s got an inoperable brain tumor and he’s going to die. he never got to live his life to the fullest.

he was going to die in the first saw movie, and it seems that he’s been consistently almost dying since then. it sounds longwinded and tedious and it is, especially saw 3. the movie’s original cut was apparently three hours long, so many scenes had to be cut or shortened. the story itself is just another rehashing of the original saw plot. at least with saw 2 they tried to make it a little more interesting by having several victims relying on each other to get out of the traps. this time, it’s just more of the same. a blend of the first two, if you will.

in the first saw, there was a twist at the end (a pretty good one at that). in the second one, there were a couple twists at the end. in this third and final edition which encloses the story of jigsaw, there are more twists and revelations than any of the other saw films combined. more blood, more traps, more twists; it’s all about outdoing the other films.

the writers also try to give a lot of back-story, to fill the holes. and if you have read some of my previous entries to this blog, you’ll know that i hate back-stories. i think they’re overdone and hackneyed, and just redundent information. some of the back-story in this was fine, but most of it was useless. there’s a heck of a lot of it, and the writers seem it necessary to explain everything from the first two movies. but really, i thought to myself, who cares? part of the fun behind these movie killers is the impossibly silly and outlandish ways they kill, and explaining all of that, sort of deflates the mystery around them. it’s like explaining a magic trick.

another problem with this horror movie is that there are no scares. this movie is not scary. it's definitely gory, but not scary. it seems that with a lot of horror movies these days, it's all about the blood and guts and less about scaring the audience to death.

maybe this movie wasn’t all that bad and i’m not giving it a fare shake. maybe the movie is great, and i was just so distracted by the girl sitting next to me who talked on her cell phone the whole time. the more she spoke, the angrier i became until i wanted to take vengeance out on her and possibly put her into one of jigsaw’s traps. and maybe therein lies the brilliance of the movie: it makes you thirst for blood. or maybe i just despise people who talk on their cell phones during movies.

all in all, it was an okay sequel, and the saw franchise has probably run its course in terms of ideas, which is probably why the original creators have said this would be their last take on the jigsaw villain. of course, this won't stop the studio from releasing another saw. there's no way they're letting this baby go, because of how huge the financial returns are. they make a movie for around twenty million, and get back four times that much. simple economics states that we'll probably see another saw movie next halloween. it's already taken top spot this weekend with a $34 million haul. i will say this though: the film goes all out, balls to the wall. there is so much blood and gore, i think it might even outdo this year's other bloody stinker, the texas chainsaw massacre prequel.

(source)