Saw IV (2007)

Lack of good storyline.

Amateur movie with Big budget

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

The coroner is performing an autopsy on the body of John Kramer. A tape is found in his stomach and police detective Hoffman is called in. Elsewhere, a man with his eyes sewn shut is chained to a man (Louis Ferreira) with his mouth sewn shut attached to a machine. Hoffman and Lieutenant Rigg lead the SWAT team to find detective Kerry's dead body. Later, Rigg is attacked at home and wakes up to find himself in one of Jigsaw's games.The franchise do two things excessively to the point of distraction. The first is the jumping around with time, places, and protagonists. It's an annoying aspect of the franchise that they like to make a jigsaw puzzle out of the plot. The other is the flashy jump edits during the gruesome reveals. It's both cheesy and limits the actual shock. It's more horrifying to slowly linger on the bloody torture. We should leisurely enjoy the grotesque reveals. Despite all that, I really do love the idea of a dead Jigsaw while his games continue and the first torture is really sweet. The first half is great with that female victim but the movie slowly drifts away from me until I stopped caring somewhere in the second half.

Saw IV gives us more gore, less brains. Wait, poor choice of words. I should say we are *shown* more brains but not required to use our own. Jigsaw, having been killed in an earlier movie, comes back but in the stupidest, most anticlimactic way possible. Almost as if the writers were sitting around 5 minutes til deadline, having elaborated on all the gory stuff, then suddenly realizing 'whoa wait, jigsaw is dead. Who's going to be behind all this crap? Aha..!' (I won't spoil it)Aside from that, even the killings lack the poetic irony that made all the other movies so fun to watch. The whole gimmick of the Saw franchise is that the killings are each part of some twisted morality lesson, sorta like Mother Goose on psychotic drugs. But here, there didn't seem to be much effort put into the karma content; instead they focused on wacky gadgets that mutilate people in interesting ways. Cool stuff, but you're left wondering 'What did that have to do with anything?'Example: Some drug addict is put into a contraption where the only way to free himself is to slice his face up with knives. Get it? I didn't either. But as the killer hastily explains: "Because you've acted so UGLY in life, now you'll have to live your life being UGLY!" Get it? I didn't either.Ultimately the movie wasn't all bad because it held my attention hoping for some grand epiphany at the end. There is indeed a "surprise twist" but it seemed to be thrown in just for the sake of a surprise twist.I'm pretty bummed because I bought the whole Saw set and was enjoying them all up until now. But SAW 4 threw a real WRENCH in the works.

Moving the franchise into a trilogy, the third brutal torture horror film explains a bit more how Jigsaw pulls off the sick games while showing even more gore. The film begins with Eric Matthews (Donnie Wahlberg) breaking his leg in an attempt to escape captivity. Detective Kerry (Dina Meyer) searches for Eric but she also falls victim to Jigsaw's awful torture. The main story consists of John Kramer (Tobin Bell) and his pupil Amanda Young (Shawnee Smith) kidnapping a surgeon Lynn Denlon (Bahar Soomekh) in order to keep John alive. Jigsaw wants to oversee one last game before he finally passes away so attaches a deadly necklace to Lynn's neck that has shotgun cartridges all around it and will go off if John's heart rate stops.The test revolves around Jeff (Angus Macfadyen) who must go through a series of awful tortures. He lost his son in a drunk driving accident and has never recovered. His first test is to help the woman who witnessed his son's death, Danica (Debra McCabe), from freezing to death. She is hung up naked in a frozen locker and has water sprayed on her periodically unless Jeff grabs a key. He burns his cheek grabbing the key but doesn't save her in time. The next round is the judge who let the killer go, Judge Halden (Barry Flatman). The Judge will be drowned in rotten pig guts if Jeff doesn't burn his son's possessions to get the key. Check out more of this review and others at swilliky.com

Since they began, the SAW films have been little more than a string of grisly death set-pieces fixed together by story lines which are often silly and sometimes completely implausible. The fourth entry in a series that shows no signs of flagging offers more of the same, except in even greater amounts: the deaths are bloodier and more painful and the storyline completely ludicrous by now. The problem is that there's so much baggage, with references to all three previous films and recurring characters popping up all over the place, that the resulting plot is a confused mess, with people turning up from two films ago only to die and more unfinished strands than you can shake a stick at. What's even worse, the events of this film play concurrently with the events of SAW 3, but that's something we only find out at the very end, leading to much "what the heck?" confusion come the final moments.The movie kicks off with an utterly gratuitous autopsy scene in which Jigsaw is dismembered in exquisite detail. First, out comes his brain, then we witness his body being sawed open and his stomach removed and cut apart. It's all slaughterhouse graphic and adds utterly nothing to the plot or movie; it's just there to be repulsive. Shortly afterwards we're back to the deadly puzzles, although they're more confused by now and kind of just happen all over the place. Yet these are still worse than before: one woman is scalped in the film's most excruciating moment, while another guy has to push his face through knives. It's all very bloody and nothing is kept to the imagination. What I did enjoy was the movie's set-piece, in which three guys are trapped in a room. One of them is chained by the neck on a block of ice that's readily melting, another one is about to get electrocuted from the rapidly collecting water beneath him. This ends with many twists, as you'd expect, and nothing disappointed.Elsewhere, the film concentrates on the acting with some surprisingly good performances from the assembled cast members. Costas Mandylor and Lyriq Bent are both fine as investigating cops, while Justin Louis puts in a kooky turn as a corrupt lawyer. Donnie Wahlberg and Angus McFadyen also pop up in returning roles, but the best performance goes to Tobin Bell, who gets a chance to develop his character in a lot of flashback scenes. Here we learn how Bell turned from family man into psychotic killer, and it's pretty interesting, giving the movie more depth than the last three films all together. Which is why I found SAW IV to be a surprisingly watchable film, much better than the last sequel. Please, though, don't let there be any more...