Review: Jigsaw (2017)

Jigsaw (2017)

Rated R for sequences of grisly bloody violence and torture, and for language

Score: 3 out of 5

My first thought after leaving the theater for Jigsaw, the eighth(!) installment in the modern-day Friday the 13th that is the Saw franchise, was "yep, that was a Saw movie." It may have little in common with the original movie, a relatively understated psychological horror film that was more keen on implying its most brutally violent scenes rather than showing them, but it definitely resembles the sequels. Graphic, lovingly detailed gore effects that the camera lingers on for as long as it can before the MPAA notices? Check. Overly elaborate death traps inflicting that damage that could not possibly have been the product of one person, or even a small amateur team like the later films revealed, but which are fucking awesome anyway, so shut up? Check. A ridiculously convoluted scheme by the villain that falls apart the moment you think about it for even a second, but the reveal of which works anyway because Charlie Clouser's iconic "Hello Zepp" theme can make anything sound awesome? You better believe it. This is a movie that goes all-in on everything that the Saw series represents, for better or worse: a film that, at its best, is both a tense crime thriller and an unflinchingly brutal gorefest, and at worst is up its own ass with its plot twists.

In other words, it's a Saw sequel.

Set ten years after the events of the older films (which mostly took place in a narrow timespan), Jigsaw is essentially a soft reboot of the franchise, acknowledging that the movies preceding it happened but otherwise starting fresh with new characters. John Kramer, the original Jigsaw killer, has been dead for ten years, but his murders have become the stuff of legend. Now, a follower of his seems to be copying Jigsaw, locking five people, all of whom had wronged others in life, in a barn full of death traps and torture devices out in the middle of nowhere and taunting police to find them before it's too late. There are many suspects, led by the forensic pathologist and Iraq veteran Logan, his partner and Jigsaw fangirl Eleanor, the sleazy detective Halloran, and a crook named Edgar who had been forced to take part in Jigsaw's new game. Since this is a Saw movie, the question isn't if the police will be too late to stop people from getting killed, but how many of Jigsaw's victims will make it out alive, and how much blood they will shed to do so.

Even after this film had been announced, I never quite realized just how nostalgic it was until the scene where Eleanor shows Logan her studio, where she has collected and created replicas of many of the series' most famous death traps. That scene drove home to me the fact that there has been a longer span of time between this film and the last Saw film than there was between that film (the seventh) and the original. College kids today were either in middle school or starting high school when the last Saw movie came out, and were just a few years out of diapers upon the release of the original. And the young filmmakers who were teenagers and twentysomethings during the original series' run are now making movies themselves. This is a film that relishes in callbacks to the prior films even if it has only the loosest connections with them story-wise, from the aforementioned "Jigsaw museum" scene to a third-act trap that calls to mind the original film to the cameo by Jigsaw himself, Tobin Bell (who, of course, also does the creepy voice on the tapes, sounding no worse for wear). Fortunately, the film has a bit more than just member-berries to run on, as it also brings the pain with new death traps and buckets of blood. If you need more than just gore to scare you, you'll probably go home disappointed, but given how blood-soaked this series is famous for being, anything less than an absolute bloodbath would've been a disappointment on my end. I wasn't expecting It Follows or The Witch here, I was expecting some gnarly, ultraviolent 2000s torture porn of the sort that makes you wonder how this didn't get slapped with an NC-17, before you realize that it's so over-the-top that even the most squeamish media watchdog couldn't possibly take it seriously. It knows what it is, and barring one cutaway early on (which turns out to have an in-story explanation), this film revels in showing us limbs getting sliced off, acid dissolving flesh, somebody getting thrown into a giant blender, and the big showcase bit involving lasers and a person's head. I can't call it scary, but I definitely can call it thrilling, a rollercoaster ride of the sort that is the Saw series' stock in trade.

Aside from Tobin Bell, the cast is composed mostly of TV actors (I recognized Laura Vandervoort, Callum Keith Rennie, and nobody else) and unknowns. They're about as good as you'd expect from a polished, if low-budget, studio horror film: mostly acceptable, with some being better than others but nobody either excelling or feeling wooden. The script is an absolute mess, hinging on (as per the other series tradition) a twist that, while it does close most of the glaring holes in the plot, opens up a slew of new ones in their place while also making the already-tangled timeline of this series even more complicated. The greater mytharc to these movies stopped feeling like it mattered around the time of the fourth film (not coincidentally, the first one where James Wan and Leigh Whannell weren't involved in a creative capacity), and I was more interested in the story of the five people trapped in Jigsaw's House of Pain, with each of them, particularly the ostensible heroine Anna, turning out to be some variety of scumbag whose cruel death is just desserts from Jigsaw. That said, when the film leans into the soapier elements of the police story, I had all the fun in the world, especially during the big reveal at the end that managed to make me forget just how ridiculous the killer's scheme was by virtue of it playing the campy drama of it to the hilt.

The Bottom Line

Nobody has been under any impression that these movies are anything more than cinematic junk food for a very long time. This is everything that the Saw series had come to represent in its later installments: a fusion of over-the-top, crowd-pleasing horror violence and the ridiculous story of a '90s Ashley Judd serial killer movie. You probably already know if you want to see this or not, so my review probably won't sway you either way, but if you're the sort of person who loves these movies, you will get your money's worth here.