Saw V Can't Live Up To Original Standards

The Saw franchise is a rare breed indeed. Any horror movie that is moderately successful usually gets enough sequels to fill up a whole rack in Blockbuster. Friday the 13th, Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, all started out strong and then were run straight into the ground by lackluster, lousy sequels. Saw has managed to be entertaining through all five movies thanks to some clever stories, interesting twists, and a serial killer we all love to hate.

If you haven’t been keeping up with this franchise, prepare to have everything up to the events of this film spoiled for you. If you have, you already know Jigsaw died in the third movie.

As the end of the fourth film showed, Detective Hoffman is now set to carry on Jigsaw’s legacy. This entry picks up precisely where part four left off with Agent Strahm locked in the room with the dead Jigsaw. He finds a way out, gets ambushed, and wakes up to find himself in a death trap. Strahm survives and has reason to suspect Hoffman may be connected with the now deceased killer. Hoffman must finish off all the loose ends. So while Strahm investigates the matter, Hoffman sets up one final game.

Take a second and think of the popular horror franchises out there. Now think about their stories. I bet you can’t. The fact of the matter is, no matter how revered a franchise like Friday the 13th or Halloween may be within the horror community, they don’t have very intriguing stories. I’ve got to hand it to the writers that have contributed to the Saw films. They attempt to give us intriguing narratives, filled with twists and turns that somehow fit into the overall story arc, attempts they are mostly successful with.

The only problem is they are taking a simple premise established in the first film (a dying man teaches those who don’t appreciate life how precious it is) and making it unnecessarily convoluted. The fifth entry of the series explores the relationship between Jigsaw and Detective Hoffman, and how he came to be the killer’s apprentice.

The timeline jumps around a lot, but it doesn’t just jump around in the context of this film. It jumps around within all five of them. There are aspects taken from the first movie that are explored in this one that don’t seem prudent to what this picture is trying to accomplish. I actually found myself a little confused by the end. Last year, I walked out of Saw IV scratching my noggin and it happened again this year with Saw V.

Tobin Bell saves this franchise. Bell is deliciously evil as the serial killer Jigsaw, but plays it perfectly cool. It’s almost in a way that you kind of want to hang out with him. He puts people in death traps, but claims he has never killed anybody in his life. He always gives them a means to survive, and in the process, teaches them that they are not leading their lives the way they should be. Jigsaw has been dead since the third movie, but still plays a major role. Good thing too, because without him, there is no franchise.

Despite its somewhat confusing story, I still had fun with this one. It is probably the weakest of the five. The twist is underwhelming, the story is confusing, and it left plenty of questions on the table (to be answered in the inevitable Saw VI: Death of a Franchise), but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Saw V is not going to convert any non-fans over to the dark side, but it will provide enough blood, guts, and thrills to satiate those souls who have already been tainted.