Make Your Choice pt. 2

An in depth look at the Saw Series

“When you’re in hell, only the devil can help you out”

– John Kramer

Continued from Make Your Choice pt. 1

Unlike the first two movies in the Saw series, Saw 3 was one of my favorites. That’s not to say that it was not without it’s faults, in fact it had many, however one aspect of the movie really saved it from a position at the bottom of my list. The Game played in Saw 3 was an artistic masterpiece that really showed Jigsaw’s genius. Not only was the Game a test for Jeff (a man who wanted vengeance for his son’s untimely death) and Laurie (Jeff’s wife) but also for Amanda, Jigsaw’s apprentice. In the beginning of the movie we are shown a number of traps that were set up by Amanda. The twist was that none of her traps were winnable. Amanda was slaughtering people rather than testing them, and of course Jigsaw found out. Overall, the trap for Laurie was uninteresting. Laurie had to keep Jigsaw alive, which didn’t add much to the movie except an extremely disgusting scene where she performed brain surgery on Jigsaw. Jeff’s trap however is where I begin to have problems with Saw 3. Jeff was given three traps, all of which centered around him either saving a person who was slightly responsible for his son’s death or killing them. I dislike these traps because the people Jeff let die didn’t have a chance to escape. I understand that Jigsaw was testing Jeff, but those three deaths seemed like senseless murder, something Jigsaw was strictly against.

Overall Saw 3 is only one of my favorite Saw movies because I liked how Jigsaw tested Amanda. To me it shows that he has standards and further proves that he does not stand for senseless murder.

The same cannot be said for Saw 4, my absolute least favorite of the Saw movies. Saw 4 is honestly just the worst thing ever. Not only did it not make sense, but they killed the only cool character and left you with two gross dudes that looked identical which was obnoxious. So overall Saw 4 was a tragedy and I would just recommend skipping it. It happens concurrently to Saw 3 which is just crazy, because at the end of Saw 4 you see that Jigsaw had known that Peter Strahm (one of the obnoxious identical guys) was going to be working on the Jigsaw case. But this is impossible because Strahm is only added to the case during this movie, so them creating a secret room with a trap for him is extremely unlikely as they had no way of knowing he would be there. That being said, they could explain it away because Detective Hoffman (the other obnoxious identical guy) was a Jigsaw Apprentice, but he didn’t know Strahm was coming until they already planned both the games in Saw 3 and Saw 4 and the game for Strahm was a part of the room Jigsaw died in in Saw 3. So really it was impossible for that to be a thing and it really ruined the whole movie because up until then at least the movies made some sort of sense and seemed possible.

Basically Saw 4 seemed possible until Strahm was shown to have his own trap, which was just silly. However this is not the only reason Saw 4 is at the bottom of my list. Often times the movies can redeem themselves with cool traps or interesting plot twists. Tragically Saw 4 had neither of these. The traps were poor at best, I mean some random SWAT dude was being “trained” to be the next apprentice by being put into his own game. He had to let people try and escape traps by themselves in order to get closer to some detective friends of his who were also in their own traps. One of these detective friends was Hoffman, and it was never clear how he got there until you find out he’s an apprentice, while the other is the detective from Saw 2 who’s son was in the game. Basically the only good part of Saw 4 was when Jigsaw impaled a lady and her husband with steel rods and told her to pull them out and free herself, killing her abusive husband in the process. I liked this trap since she was freeing herself figuratively and literally, but overall it was the only good trap.

Saw 4 was truly a tragedy in the sense that it had bad Games, bad traps and made zero sense. Fortunately though, Saw 5 and 6 were able to redeem the series in a way.

To be continued…

“Until a person is faced with death, it’s impossible to tell whether they have what it takes to survive.”

John Kramer (Saw 2)