Shortly after I published my review of Saw VI, I was talking to a friend about the franchise. He read the latest review and then said to me, "Tell me they stopped making them." When I informed him that there were still two movies to go, he replied, "Oh, God damn it." So there you go: probably the average reaction to hearing that there are still two Saw movies left to cover.
At the end of Saw VI Detective Mark Hoffman, the new Jigsaw Killer had just seen his plans collapse before narrowly escaping being killed by Jill Tuck - tying up the last loose ends as per her ex-husband's last request - with a new and improved Reverse Bear Trap. Not one to just get out of town and start a new life somewhere else (perhaps building endless Rube Goldberg devices) though, Hoffman sticks around and two months later is running two new games and preparing to take his revenge on Jill Tuck, who has gone to the police for protection at this point. The main player of the new 'game', however, is Bobby Dagan, a man who has made it big with his self-help book 'inspired' by his time as a Jigsaw Survivor... except he never was one in the first place. As we (and, ironically, Hoffman) know, Jigsaw doesn't like taking credit for things he never did, and so Bobby soon finds himself playing one of Jigsaw's games for real. And is that Dr Gordon we see there in the Survivor group?
So, the Saw franchise gets to join the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises in having an entry that claims to be the 'final' one but isn't. Coincidentally, the same three series are also in the 3D club together - so be prepared for plenty of things to be thrown, shot, propelled and otherwise flung at the screen during the course of the film.
Something else that's apparently been thrown out of a window is the series' continuity and sense of disbelief. I assume that the studio, thinking at the time that this was going to be the end of the series, just decided to go all-out and not worry about any of those annoying questions, such as, "How did no-one see the Public Execution Trap (or as I like to call it, the Bros Before Hos Trap) being set up or anything until the very moment the 'participants' start waking up?" and "What do you mean, Jigsaw's been doing this for years? What sort of malignant inoperable brain tumour did John Kramer have, exactly?" Because remember, Saws III and IV took place simultaneously; there were only six months between II and III/IV, and V and VI happened immediately after each other and straight after IV. So the only way the timeline works is if there was one hell of a time jump between the first and second movies, or the first movie had a hell of a lot come before it.
But enough about the timeline: let's talk traps. As it was planned to be the end of the series at the time, they really went all out with them this time. People get ripped in half, have their heads crushed by spinning car wheels, have to rip the skin off their own backs, get roasted in Brazen Bulls... Furthermore, after seven films we finally get to see the Reverse Bear Trap in action as another gory money shot near the film's climax. With the originality of the traps in this movie, the so-called "Sentry Gun Trap" stands out as being quite laughably simple - it's a motion-activated machine gun. It was two smaller portions of larger traps that really made me squirm the most though - one scene where a key attached to a fish hook had to be pulled up from a victim's stomach and throat, and a scene where Bobby has to pull two of his wisdom teeth out with pliers.
The revelation of yet another secret apprentice of John Kramer's puts the film into French farce territory though. John Kramer must have had the best time-management abilities in the world to keep Mark Hoffman from knowing about Lawrence Gordon - I'm imagining scenarios in which one walks out of one door just as the other comes in another: "Who were you talking to there, John?" "Oh, just talking to myself. Hand me the welding torch and the really big spike set." And when you include the revelation of Jigsaw, it just gets even more convoluted. Perhaps John Kramer didn't even exist and was just a shared hallucination of several psychopaths with good engineering skills.
No, the series isn't that smart.
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