Film Review: ‘Jigsaw’
“How are you still alive?” That’s a dirty cop, with a laser slicer locked around his neck, shouting at Jigsaw, née John Kramer (Tobin Bell), the serial killer who organizes his Rube Goldberg torture games like little parochial-school lessons of limb-severing pain. (If you’re a sinner — and who isn’t? — you’re going to pay.) A viewer might well be tempted to ask the same question of the “Saw” franchise: After seven movies’ worth of heart-in-the-throat horror (yes, I mean that literally), does the series even have a pulse?
The last time we checked, at the end of “Saw 3D,” the seventh chapter of the series, Jigsaw was most definitely dead (he had cancer). This means that “Jigsaw,” the first “Saw” film since 2010, has two key questions to answer: How, if at all, did its maniac demon mascot survive? And is there any body part left for this franchise to mangle in a new way? The answers are: 1) Maybe he survived, maybe he didn’t; and 2) Of course there isn’t! But in the eyes of a true “Saw” fan, does it matter?
“Jigsaw” should have been called “Saw: Back in Business.” Directed by Michael and Peter Spierig, the German-born Australian brothers who made “Daybreakers,” the movie has a garishly rote machine-tooled butcher-shop dismember-by-numbers inevitability. For 92 minutes, it more or less succeeds in sawing through your boredom, slicing and dicing with a glum explicitness that raises the occasional tingle of gross-out suspense but no longer carries a kick of real shock value.
The film opens, as any “Saw” movie must, in a meticulously designed enclosed space, with its human guinea-pig victims trapped, shackled, and terrified. In this case, there are five of them, each with their head encased in a metal bucket, and long chains leading them to a wall that is studded with circular saws. As the chains pull all of them toward the wall, they seem headed toward certain shredding, until someone figures out the game — allow yourself to get cut, just a wee bit, and you’ll be saved. Four of them follow the advice, but the fellow on the end does not. He winds up on the autopsy table, where the movie gives us more surgical glimpses than you would have thought possible of a head that’s been sliced in two, like a melon, right above the lower jaw.
This is major icky Guignol stuff (in other words, for a “Saw” fan: a good laugh), and the merriment is just compounded by the fact that the autopsy is being conducted by what appears to be the world’s two sexiest pathologists, both of whom are presented by the film as potential villainous-mastermind suspects. Logan (Matt Passmore) is all friendly, shaggy-blond, and Chris Pratt-like, but he’s an Iraq War veterans who was tortured in Fallujah, so he’s got a theoretical link to the Saw games. As for his physician partner, Eleanor (Hannah Emily Anderson), she’s a redhead flirt who looks far too happy in her work, and it turns out that she’s got a major obsession with Jigsaw. The cops uncover her visits to a site on the deep web devoted to John Kramer, and when she takes Logan to a space where she has stashed her collection of exotic torture devices, she beams with pride, like the world’s most extreme dominatrix.
Jigsaw, from what we can see, appears to be very much alive. He shows up in classic form — as a harlequin marionette on a bicycle, with glowing red eyes — and we hear his voice on taped messages, in which he tells the four remaining victims what to do next — but, mostly, hectors them for the awful lives they’ve led. It’s no spoiler that Tobin Bell is in the movie, so let me say — without ruining the mystery (trust me: It doesn’t) — that he’s in vintage form, like L.A.’s creepiest cult guru, devoted to the lessons that his unspeakable tortures are going to impart. (He’s like Freddy Krueger crossed with Leonard Cohen.) The cleverest thing about the “Saw” films is the way they hoodwink into thinking that he’s providing a public service.
But, of course, what these films really tap into is a kind of jaded rage; they jack up the fear factor for audiences who’ve come to regard empathy as a snowflake emotion. In “Jigsaw,” the victims, going their interlocked ritual mayhem, aren’t just paying for their own sins: a woman who snatched purses and left a victim without her life-saving medicine; a dude who knowingly sold a motorcycle with faulty brakes; a mother driven so crazy by her baby crying that she…well, let’s not spoil the preposterousness of that one.
Most of them are given the option of mangling themselves in order to save someone else — like the guy who elects to let his lower leg get sliced off by wires (an idea lifted from “Audition”) to give respite to two of his comrades, who are being buried alive in a grain elevator…as well as being rained down on by knives and saws. The “Saw” genre was once dubbed “torture porn.” But at this point a more accurate description might simply be “overkill.”
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