Saw V

I can definitely see why this film is usually thought of as one of the weaker in the series. This is the point at which the series officially gave up on trying to tie it's stories together. In the previous four films we saw a series of traps that had some connection to the main story. In this film we get a series of traps that are going on parallel to the main story, with very little interaction. We see that Hoffman (Costas Mandylor, again) is aware of the traps, but that's about it.

I'd actually say that this film, more than any other in the series, is the point at which the writers have no clear idea where they're going. We see a group of people being tested, we get Hoffman's backstory, and we continue to follow Agent Strahm (Scott Patterson) as he hunts for the identity of the Jigsaw killers. None of these threads really seem to go anywhere.

The victims of the traps are eventually revealed to be people Jigsaw (Tobin Bell, duh) blames for a fire that killed eight people. The traps in this movie were designed to be most easily won if the victims worked together. Instead, by fighting each other for survival, only two of them were able to get out alive (Julie Benz and Greg Bryk), and only that with great difficulty. This doesn't tie into any other current or future story-lines as best I can tell, except that one of the two survivors shows up for a cameo in the final movie.

It also doesn't help that all of the surviving victims have equal freedom of movement after the first trap. Because of this, the driving force of the traps is consistently the same: If a task isn't completed by a certain time, nail-bombs will go off and kill all the surviving victims. Having a single victim in a trap at a time was far more effective in previous and future films. Furthermore, constricting victims in different ways meant many of the traps could be tailored to a specific victim. Not so here.

The story of Strahm is interesting, but...well...he dies at the end of this movie, being framed as the second Apprentice. Quite frankly, he dies in an unbelievably stupid way. He's told by a Jigsaw recording that he has to get into a bulletproof box full of shattered glass to survive, and so he forces Hoffman in. Apparently it didn't occur to him that the glass box might have been a means of survival. Furthermore, as Jigsaw traps go, laying on glass until the walls close in and kill whoever else is in the room seems like an unbelievably generous opportunity. Strahm is just dumb.

Also, framing a dead person for an ongoing murder-spree seems nonsensical to me. Even if his body is never found, how long could the theory “Strahm is still in the same city, but no one has seen him in all this time” really seem plausible? Certainly at some point in the next ten years someone would consider the possibility that they had the wrong man pegged for the second Apprentice. It seems like it would have been far more effective with some hint Hoffman planned on retiring soon, but if that was the implication I didn't catch it.

The final plotline, Hoffman's origin as an Apprentice, doesn't fail in and of itself, but still fails in relation to Hoffman's overall arc. We see who Hoffman was. He was an alcoholic cop who made an inescapable Jigsaw trap to punish the man who killed his sister (Joris Jarsky). This led to Jigsaw recruiting him as an Apprentice.

The problem here is that, even seeing this story, I have no idea who Hoffman is now. It's clear that John had an effect on him, but I'm not sure what that effect was. He never shows any particular sign of caring about the rehabilitation of his victims, and his primary goals always seem to be evading detection. I don't see an endgame for Hoffman the way I did for Jigsaw. Where Jigsaw seemed detached, Hoffman seems far too indifferent to be dedicating his time to this matter.

As for the traps of this movie, it's like they combined the overly-elaborate nature of the later films' traps, with the relatively non-graphic nature of the original Saw. Most of the deaths are quick, and only a few traps have any especially graphic elements. I have no idea what they were going for, but you don't get to use nail-bombs and decapitating collars and claim a return to subtlety.

So, can the characters save it? Not really. None of the characters are as well-established as in previous Saw films, and their personalities even seem to change scene to scene. One man (Carlo Rota) goes from the voice of reason to a Social Darwinist over the course of a few minutes for no adequately explained reason.

One thing of merit I did find in this movie is a possible homage to the original Dracula film with Bela Lugosi. It's a bit of a stretch, but both films have scenes following a similar structure: A horror icon is standing over a subordinate he's in the process of recruiting. He then makes a dramatically significant statement with an independent clause, followed by a pause, and then a subordinate clause.

“I never drink...wine...”

“Killing is distasteful!...to me!”

This is probably the first Saw film I can safely say is not simply “bad” from some snobby artistic level, but is just downright uninteresting. I find it quite depressing that it's the one that got Julie Benz, who's truly wasted here. If you marathon the series, fast forward through anything not involving Hoffman or Strahm.

...oh, and the final trap is based around the idea that there's a specific amount of blood a human body can lose without dying, regardless of body weight. That's just stupid.