“This one has a GREAT setup: a dude who is claiming to have survived a Jigsaw trap in order to cash-in on the true crime book circuit (a remake would certainly replace this circuit with that of a true crime podcast circuit, each podcast hosted by two ladies that possess, between them: 1-2 pairs of chunky glasses, 1-2 “fun” colors added to their hair, 1 12-foot Home Depot skeleton that they’ve given a cute name like Charles Lee Ray, 1 weekly Wikipedia-fed knowledge of a true crime event, 1 ability to sit back and be amazed at the tale having put in no prior work whatsoever).
If you can excuse me for getting a little philo-saw-sical here, which, why not, this is a review of a 12 year-old part 7 of a 10-part horror franchise that’s almost completely out of ideas:
It’s odd that Jigsaw would take offense to what this charlatan is doing. I mean, Jigsaw is all about making something of yourself, bootstrapping to an extent. Bro was a shiftless layabout who DID at least get off his ass and write a book. Granted, it was fiction on the level of a James Frey situation, but still, those words don’t type themselves.
Issues of journalistic integrity seem beneath Jigsaw, IMO.
Especially in this movie, where other victims are nazis. How does that make any sense? The victims are going to learn to be nicer to Jewish people because one time a psycho tried to murder them in a trap?
Main Nazi is played by none other than Chester Bennington, which was such a weird casting choice.
“Hey, you want to be in Saw? You can scream really good, seems like it’d work.”
“Fuck yeah, who am I?”
“A nazi!”
Why wouldn’t you just make him, I don’t know, any other kind of Jigsaw victim? Like, any other type of person who has been killed in these movies up to this point?
“You’ve wasted your life making mediocre nu metal albums, never achieving the success of Hybrid Theory. Now you will pay for your inability to crack the Billboard Top 100.”
[as a note, I was a huge Linkin Park fan and am unashamed]
The worst part of this movie is probably that Tobin Bell is captivating and intense on screen for about 45 seconds in sweatpants and a backwards baseball cap. Dude looked like he rolled in from the gym, and he still gave us more in 5 lines than we got from like 3 full movies of JV squad Jigsaws. You just wanted to hug him, and when he walks out of frame, I was like, “Please, don’t go! We need you!””