“Saw was in a place in 2021. It couldn’t keep on as it had. Even the diehards were like, Bro, we’ve mined the original trilogy so hard that the tenuousness of the connection isn’t worth trying to maintain anymore.
And I do give Saw bros credit, they use words like “tenuousness.”
Saw, I think, was the movie that held the torch for so-called “torture porn” for a very long time, but I think that was a bit unfair.
Hostel, to me, is the one that really wears that crown. And although Saw was brutal and grimy, it gave us something a little more interesting in the slasher genre: a killer with a real motive.
Michael Myers has not motive. He’s just bad. Jason has a motive, sort of, but it’s mostly to kill people who are around. Freddy has a motive, and I think it helps make Elm Street one of the better series.
Jigsaw had a motive, and that meant we had something worth watching.
I guess the “torture” part comes in because, let’s all admit it, the fun of a Saw movie was in the insane contraptions. The ideas behind them were gruesome, but hasn’t that always been part of the slasher genre? Certainly Friday the 13th was all about buckets of blood. The first Elm Street had a blood fountain.
Michael Myers gets a pass a lot of times because that movie’s been given some extra credit as a “film,” but isn’t a huge part of that movie the fear? And, here we go: I think this is about our natural bias in thinking that visual depiction of something is more heinous than trying to create a feeling of fear is viewers in other ways.
This is kind of like the way “erotic fiction” is put in higher regard than pictorial pornography. When it’s in the mind, it’s art. When it’s on the screen, it’s porn.
I end up feeling like the Saw franchise has been judged unfairly as a result.
Did it run out of ideas after…I’m calling it 3 movies? Yes, absolutely. Did Elm Street, Friday the 13th, and Halloween get that far? I think Elm Street peaked at 4, at best. Friday the 13th part 3 was in 3D, so that tells you what you need to know (although the next entry was better). Halloween? Michael Myers fans checked out for movie 3, which I maintain is still a good horror movie with a totally bonkers plot, and I wish we’d gotten a weird-ass John Carpenter Halloween-the-Holiday-Not-The-Film-Series movie every year.
That said, even as a Saw stan, I will admit that when Luke somehow found himself falling out of Star’s Hallow and into Jigsaw’s clutches, we’d jumped the shark, which was in a tank to prove an ironic lesson dating back to sometime around the first movie, all of which would be explained in flashback and I would probably, mostly, kind of understand.
Credit where credit is due: it was time to try something else with the idea of Saw, and having a copycat killer in the Saw universe seemed like a decent way to continue to bring that fanbase along while also putting some life into an idea that was beaten way beyond death.
The result, however, didn’t work.
I’ve got nothing against Chris Rock, and I sort of get this casting. It could’ve worked. But it didn’t. You never feel like you’re watching a movie with a detective in it, you feel like you’re watching Chris Rock with a tie.
The plot is oddly realistic in one way, in that it’s mostly cops running around from place to place, getting a little closer to the killer each time until it finally works out because if you run to enough crime scenes, I guess you’ll eventually get there fast enough.
But the plot is a very typical revenge-y thing, none of the things that made the original Saw more interesting in terms of motive. “You did something bad, now you’ll be punished” isn’t really a story.
And maybe that’s what I’m getting at: The original Saw had a plot AND a story.
The plot was that a nut was killing people in elaborate ways that mimicked his struggle, to show people that if life was of enough value to them, they could endure. You know, an underexplored element of this plot was related to that movie Fearless and the idea that people who live through a super-traumatic near-death experience, like a plane crash, often report being a lot happier and more serene than before. I can’t imagine that’d happen for me, I respond to tragedy by becoming worse, but I digress.
The STORY of Saw was something about affirming life, in a totally backwards way. If you’ve been through something super tough, you know that it can make you tougher, or it can break you, or leave you somewhere in between. You come out better or worse, but rarely come out unchanged.
Spiral doesn’t have a story. I think it was vaguely, almost, kind of a story about police brutality, but those dots never connected, and instead we got a pretty cartoonish look at police that didn’t really address anything outside the universe of the film. Plus, the conceit doesn’t work: the idea that a Jigsaw-like killer does the same thing, but to cops instead of other folks, doesn’t really justify its own existence. Why go to those lengths to punish dirty cops? Why give them a chance at survival?
And Spiral doesn’t have a plot, either. A series of things happen, and characters float along on a wave of events, plus some backstory that’s doled out in a super-slow, let’s stretch out the tension artificially, sort of way.
Without a story and without a plot, Spiral doesn’t leave a whole lot for us, other than the surprise that Samuel L. Jackson does appear in more than 2 scenes. But not by a whole lot.”