Somewhat disappointing but still enjoyable enough

Rating: 6/10 (22 July 2015)

Finding themselves trapped in a room together, two men are at the mercy of a sadistic killer intent on infusing lessons into his traps and must solve the deadly game while attempting to stay alive for a detective to save them.
While initially this appears quite enjoyable, there's a few rather alarming flaws here with this one. The biggest issue with the film is the fact that there's really nothing here that can make the killer all that imposing for the simple extrapolation of this one's most ingenious part, that he never physically lays a hand on the victims. There's never a time here where he manages to actually cause harm to people, only by setting up the scenarios the victims are put into so that they make a choice to carry through the entirety of the sequence in order to escape. It's impossible to do anything but get worked over by the goriness of those traps, and the fact that there's not a whole lot of them means that the killer is so rarely seen in here there's little that can be don generated from this other than ingenuity and creativeness which has little to nothing to do with him. Likewise, the issue of finding the rationale for imprisoning them under his own misguided morality and sense of justice never makes any sense, for his guise of taking others and forcing them into life-or-death traps makes for incredibly twisted logic that doesn't have anything remotely close to teaching people lessons and more with him simply being a raving lunatic with people placed inside grisly traps that eventually results in their deaths. Beyond these issues, though, this one is somewhat enjoyable for what it manages to do with a very simple storyline. Taking two people trapped in a room, with no way to connect to the outside world, and have an hour and a half to resolve a series of clues and scenarios to escape is quite impressive by being able to wrap an entertaining story around that premise. That stays pretty consistent here with the way this unfurls, with them coming together quite nicely to keep this one really enjoyable as it builds throughout here that give off a really grisly set-up. That this is set-up with the flashbacks throughout here to the other traps makes for quite a fun time as the traps that were set by Jigsaw are extremely clever, from a maze of barbed wire to running through a candle-lit room covered in flammable material is very creative. The side-plot of the detectives hunting him down is also rather enjoyable getting in some solid mystery angles and set-ups leading into the final half, which throws one of the greatest twists around that fits the story incredibly well, is nearly impossible to predict and comes off marvelously. These here make this one worthwhile.
Rated R: Graphic Violence, Graphic Language, and children in jeopardy.