Patron Pick – Saw 3

This special reward is available to Patreon patrons who pledge at the $10 or $20 monthly levels. Each month, those patrons will pick a film for me to review. If they choose, they also get to include some of their thoughts about the movie. This Pick comes from Matt Harris.

Saw 3 (2006)
Written by Leigh Whannell and James Wan
Directed by Darren Lynn Bousman

I have never seen a single film in the Saw franchise before this one. That made my viewing experience quite an incoherent one. If you asked me what I knew about this franchise, it would have been that Tobin Bell played the bad guy Jigsaw, and he made elaborate death traps. Asked about characters or plot beyond that I would simply have to shrug both before and after watching Saw 3. I have no idea. It became very clear within moments of the film starting that I was supposed to recognize several of these characters. The weird thing is that no new characters were introduced, so I understood them to be new. Thus, I kept wondering who the ongoing series characters were and who were the ones just being introduced to die.

Saw 3 just begins in the middle of a story. A man is in a grimy, dark bathroom. There are brutal traps everywhere, and the man is trying to escape by mutilating himself. It’s unclear who he is or why he’s there, but he fails and dies gruesomely. I’m not sure if this death is supposed to matter or not. Eventually, we see Jigsaw; he’s sick and lying in a hospital bed in his secret headquarters/workshop. His apprentice is Amanda, who I think was the woman in the trailer for the original Saw movie who had a device strapped to her head. Is this before or after that? There are flashbacks at some point…or they could be flashforwards that show her with a shorter haircut, and things seem different. We also see Jigsaw alive and well during some of these events, and it looks like he was faking his death. So, in a previous movie, people thought Jigsaw was dead, and this scene reveals that was yet another ruse?

Amanda kidnaps Lynn, a talented surgeon who Jigsaw wants to operate on his brain tumor. Amanda doesn’t seem to like having this lady around. Then there’s Jeff, who feels completely disconnected from everything other than that he’s being put through one of Jigsaw’s tests. It centers around his son being killed by a drunk/reckless driver. People involved in that, from an eyewitness who walked away, the judge, and the perpetrator himself, are put in Jeff’s hands to let live or die. The ending of the film is shot in such a way that I can tell the filmmakers want me saying, “Whoa! Is that…? Holy shit!” but it’s all so comically silly that I just found Saw 3 an incoherent mess.

Beyond looking like a feature-length Korn music video, Saw 3 is another piece of media written by Leigh Wahnell, the co-creator of this series and Insidious. I am baffled as to how Wahnell has kept getting work in horror because I haven’t found anything he’s written to be that scary. I suppose he makes very easily digestible junk, but the violence here in Saw is pretty extreme. I saw a review that said this is probably the most gory and violent in the series, and it certainly seemed that way. The context behind that violence feels paper-thin at best here, though.

So Jigsaw kills people whom he sees as deserving of it? They have transgressed another person more often than not and are forced to harm themselves in the extreme to atone. However, it seems Jigsaw loves to fuck people over no matter what choice they make. Some of the reasons our antagonist gives for the people in this film feel like stretching it. Lynn, especially, is suddenly told she is being tested for some pretty negligible reasons. It felt like the screenwriters just needed her to be trapped so she couldn’t leave, and they contrived some reasons why she’s “bad.”

I mentioned the editing above, but I really want to emphasize how ridiculously bad this movie is cut. There are so many swipes and slashes while people are mid-conversation. Then you toss in flashbacks (I think) where the characters suddenly look slightly different and are in a different location. My guess is that this type of very quickly-paced editing creates a feeling of anxiety that younger viewers mistake for genuine horrific fear. When you analyze the sensation more closely, it’s just the feeling you get when lights are flashing and loud noises are happening.

The Saw franchise thinks it’s doing something clever based on how Jigsaw’s dialogue is written. However, that wit & philosophy feel more like what a middle school child would think is edgy. At a certain point, the violence wears thin and becomes unpleasant rather than thrilling. We’re left with stilted, idiotic dialogue from Jigsaw attempting to justify it. Every adult in this film acts like the stupider version of that person in that occupation from real life. The cops here are somehow dumber than real cops. There’s lots of shouting in place of actors conveying emotion.

I cannot see myself ever voluntarily watching another of these movies. This one was involuntary, as it was a patron pick. That’s the only way I’d ever watch them, to be paid to. It’s pretty disheartening that the franchise had such a major cultural impact. It’s not surprising, though. The similarly stupid Friday the 13th trafficked in the same hollow tropes, introducing new people to kill with every entry and playing in the most sloppy lore imaginable. If you’re someone who enjoys Saw, well, good luck with all of that.