Saw III (2006) and Saw IV (2007)
A friend encouraged me to see the next couple of movies in the Saw series.
So far my friend had already shown me the first "Saw" movie (my review here), which I thought was a mediocre rip-off of David Fincher's "Se7en" given an odd sort of charm by Danny Glover's performance and the weird clown puppet the villain used to communicate with people.
My friend had also already shown me "Saw II" which I thought was pretty bad, but still had an odd sort of watchability (my review here). All the characters felt a bit thin, but there were some neat traps and I didn't feel entirely upset at having watched it. This time around the villain was able to appear in person and he managed to give a pretty neat performance.
The third Saw movie, imaginatively titled "Saw III", revolves around a man mourning the death of a child. He is then introduced to a number of different people who have been kidnapped by the villain, Jigsaw, and placed in nasty traps for the protagonist to discover. Each of these people is somehow connected to the death of the protagonist's child and he has the option as to whether he wants to free them or leave them to perish.
I wasn't terribly inclined to like the protagonist since he seems rather unsympathetic from the very start and what's more he's played by the head of the secret police in the movie "Equilibrium". When the very first victim he meets is allowed to die horribly for the 'crime' of having witnessed her son's death, it seemed unlikely that anyone was going to be allowed to live in this film.
Finding anyone to actually emotionally invest in within the Saw movies has been a big problem ever since Danny Glover ceased to star in them. Without that emotional investment there's very little to make me worry about the outcome of each trap.
The only person who really felt worth caring about in "Saw III" was a doctor who is kidnapped and forced to keep the villain alive. (She is persuaded by an explosive collar around her neck.) But unfortunately she never really gets the chance to develop.
Character development seems to be a real weakness in the Saw movies. In fact, come to think of it, Danny Glover's bitterness in the first movie is probably the nearest thing to decent character development I've seen in this franchise.
"Saw IV" follows a character from what is, by now, looking like the most inept law enforcement office in movie history. He's being encouraged to follow a series of clues and, like our protagonist in the last film, expected to give his own verdict on what should happen to the victims in order to 'learn some lessons'. Meanwhile the FBI seem to (finally!) be involved in the investigation. They decide to pursue Jigsaw's long-estranged wife for more clues and that's the excuse to include a lot of flashbacks.
When we reach Saw IV one thing I can praise the movie for is its scene transitions. A transition can be a straight fade to black to make the end of a scene clear, a change in scenery can indicate a new scene, and many will have seen how the Star Wars movies used a fancy transition effect which worked its way across the screen.
In Saw IV the scene transitions are often quite clever. For example in one instance the camera moves away from a trap towards a door which then bursts open, except that the person bursting through the door isn't anywhere near the trap. The door they burst through is in a completely different scene. In another example of a scene transition, the central Saw villain, in a flashback, is sitting in a chair beside a hospital bed. He then stands up and turns away from the camera to stand facing a policeman talking in an interrogation room. The villain's back is clearly in the foreground for around 30 seconds, but he's not in the interrogation room at all. The interrogation room is an entirely new scene.
This all sounds a bit weird, I'm sure. So if you don't mind spoilers, you can see the every scene transition in Saw IV in this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zELat_lzJ
The continuity in Saw IV feels rather dodgy. We have another unlikeable protagonist. The 'moral' of the story feels heavy-handed and daft at the same time. The flashbacks portray a fairly thin backstory for the villain which does little more than to further take away the mystery from his character and make him seem more ridiculous than ever.
By this point the Saw movies have already started getting boring and it's only because the Saw series continues to promise that there will be a resolution later on that I can imagine anyone continuing to watch these movies. Is this where they got the idea for the tv series "Lost"? Having a continuous story which piles on the twists and turns, but never looks like it's going to end?
These two Saw films are intended to be connected to each other, but by this point all the Saw movies just seem to blur into one another anyway.
D-
(Cross posted to Halloween Candy)