Something of a step back for me, ‘Saw 3’ seems to be the beginning of the series becoming messy and overly self referential. A film that seems to exist more to tie up plot points from the last 2 films and set up plot points for the next couple of films. As a standalone work and a film in its own right, its kind of loose and uneven right up until the final act. At which point theres a plot twist that feels a bit like a less engaging redo of the twist from ‘Saw 2’.
The plot here? The films opens IMMEDIATELY after the events of ‘Saw 2’ and ties that plotline up more or less, but then things kind of jump around for most of the runtime, going as far back as to before the events of Amanda’s first encounter with Jigsaw. And as far forward as the present day (2006) and a couple of months after the events of ‘Saw 2’ with Amanda kidnapping a doctor to help keep a critically ill Jigsaw alive by any means necessary. If she fails a collar shes been fitted with will explode removing her head from her body.
She has to keep Jigsaw alive for as long as it takes his *other* test subject to finish his challenge. This is a father of a son who was murdered in a car accident and has sworn vengence on the killer, the judge who sentenced him leniently and anyone else involved in the incident. The father goes face to face with these people who all have increasing involvement in the incident, where he has to decide whether to badly injure himself in order to save these people, or whether to let them die, get his vengence and get him to the end of the test.
If you’ve seen the first 2 ‘Saw’ films, you wont be surprised to learn there are PLENTY of twists and turns unexpected reveals and more.
And probably the closest description I can have for this thing is that it takes some of the elements that I loved in ‘Saw 2’ and marries them up to some elements I absolutely hated from ‘Saw’, then dumbs things down a little bit.
The script doesnt really hang properly for me, as I mentioned it feels more like this film only exists really to tie stuff off and set stuff up for future movies at the sacrifice of bothering to make the story it IS telling solid. The first act is really slow going, unevenly paced and has a constant ‘stop/start’ nature to it, the 2nd act speeds things up a little bit, but still really doesnt feel like a properly coherent movie. with only the 3rd act (which is largely set in the present) being a properly solid work…But even then the big plot twists just dont have the same punch that ‘Saw 2’ had.
They’ve still managed to maintain the right balance on tone that I feel ‘Saw 2’ managed to really nail. and its nice to see the characters get a bit more depth and complexity after the previous film left a lot of those questions on a base note only. This one clocks in at an hour and 43, and like the original, I think its padded, bloated and really should have been 15 to 20 minutes shorter.
The direction isnt great. styalization here seems largely left to the post production crew who’ve made the decision to tint this whole thing ‘piss yellow’ basically, there are a few odd scenes scattered across the runtime that do have a bit more personality in how they’ve been directed, but for the most part, this thing looks really quite flat and uninteresting and It feels a bit looser on the communication front between the cast and crew.
Cast direction isnt as solid as ‘Saw 2’ either for me, the core characters are established by this point, so they can kind of ‘autopilot’ it with mixed to positive results, but the supporting cast, particularly Jigsaws victims are all cookie cutter. they just scream ‘save me’ over and over again until they’re dead. A far cry from ‘Saw 2’ where our victims actually got to DO stuff beyond pleading to be spared… even if they were on the chopping block.
The cine is hideous in my opinion, and not intentionally. Large chunks of the film are super underlit meaning even in the darkest room, your watching a black screen with the occasional flicker of life behind it, composition isnt particularly pretty (I get that this is supposed to be a grimey nasty looking film, but you can present that nastiness in a way that makes me feel the crew gave a damn on set)
The colour grading choices are just plain ugly too, and adding to the woes, the edit, while tight for the *most* part, sees the return of those hideous quick cut edit sequences as the traps are playing out. But they do it WAY WAY more than the last film and it wore my patience out pretty quickly. Outside of that, its similar criticisms to what I had with ‘Saw’, the edits are alright, paced largely okay. But everything just feels *slightly* longer than it should have been, and some scenes really made me wonder what the point of showing me it was.
While im still quite delighted that the awful scoring from the first movie has yet to really make a reappearence. its once again been replaced with a total nothing of a score that was so great…I literally couldnt hum you a line of it. forgettable is better than bad. but it really doesnt do this thing any favours.
Honestly; if it wasnt for the fact that the 3rd act seems to *just about* stick the landing and that some of the scenes in this film were genuinely entertaining. It would probably be the worst entry to date. Its a bridge movie, it exists just to make future entries more solid. When it feels like you made your movie by just…emptying the vault of deleted scenes from ‘Saw’ 1 & 2, stitching it together with around an hour of new material before half heartedly shoving it out the door. You gotta ask, whats the point really?
Like I say; had it not been for the fact that just over a third of this movie is genuinely entertaining and fun, and that (broadly speaking) the majority of the film is to studio grade standard (it doesnt got above that). My rating would probably be half of what i’ve given it here.
But I cant in good faith recommend this one, and Im VERY unlikely to watch it on its own merit, if I watch it ever again. I think i’ll only ever watch this again if Im doing a marathon, because it makes sense as part of a marathon…but on its own?…nah.
TYTD Reviews 