Weak and pretentious

Rating: 6/10 (11 September 2007)

The first SAW film wasn't the best movie, and it had severe flaws in the directing, acting, and scriptwriting. But it's plot wasn't very derivative, although influenced by Se7en and other such thrillers. It was a pretty damn good plot line in a time when horror movies seemed to mean nothing else but crappy remakes of Japanese or Korean films with busty blonds and pale, anorexic little children possessed by evil spirits. It was a fun movie, with some good gore and some very interesting ideas, and was overall watchable if you turned off your critical brain for a few hours, an above average film overall. After months and months of critical acclaim and popularity that seemed to spread like a disease, we got the second SAW, which was mediocre at best, and then we got this the very next year. While initially appealing, SAW 3 sadly continues the downward spiral into mediocrity that had so plagued the second film after more than one viewing.
What's wrong with it? I'd say it's just weak. The SAW movies may get brandied about on radio talk-shows and newspaper clippings as being the most extreme, outrageous, violent movies out there, but if you walked into this one looking for blood and guts, you'll be rather disappointed. This is actually the weakest of the three SAW films, not only in terms of quality, but also in terms of go-for-the-throat brutality and plot twists. Compared to the mad-carnival thrill ride of the first SAW (which only featured two men alone in a room, by the way), this film is positively neutered. Sure, it seems menacing at first, especially the fabled brain surgery scene, but once you're used to it, you realize just how blunt this beast's teeth are.
My main example here is the 'games' featured here. The traps on display here are oddly restrained. The first movie featured an intriguing, spine-tingling trap involving a man who cut his wrists regularly, even though his life was perfectly fine. Our suicidal friend was locked in an iron cage, barbed wire criss-crossed over every bare inch of space inside it. To make it out alive, he'd have to cut himself again and again on the spiky barbs to reach the door, which would close forever once an hour was up. Compare this to the first (main) trap featured in SAW 3 - we have a naked woman tied to some poles above her in an ice-cold freezer, dangling there like a pendulum as our hero enters the frigid prison. His task is to...squeeze in between some bars and fetch a key behind them, ripping off some skin on his face as it touches the frozen bars. Excuse me, but I expected far, far more from a movie like this. You could tell me that the hooks trap from the beginning was good, and maybe it was, but it still doesn't hold a candle to the barbed wire stunt from the first movie either way, mainly serving as a poor ripoff of that one, if even that. It's pathetic, really, that all they could come up with here was either a boring rehash of an older trap, or a weak attempt at being 'lol wtf gross' (the pig guts trap - lame). The final trap - The Rack - is very good, on the contrary, boasting the dark, tortured genius that we all know the SAW films can pull off, and it's a shame they only really let loose for 5 or 10 minutes out of the whole movie.
You could say that SAW 3 focuses more on the plot with Jeff and his crisis and all, but that's crap, these movies are torture horror films, and there's no point in watching them aside from seeing the cool traps and watching people die. They're like the cyber generation's Friday the 13th saga, as much as Leigh Whannel wants to jazz things up and make this movie seem better than it actually is, with the fancy Hollywood gloss and polished-to-the-brim special effects (that lose the charm and allure of the more savage, primal ones from the first movie, also). SAW 3 is far, far too pretentious and takes itself way too seriously. This is a neutered film that lacks the power and raw, unbridled anger and conviction of the first one, and it's a damn shame, although it was certainly bound to happen sooner or later.
The plot is a bit of a departure from the more pugilistic and straightforward ones in the past two movies, and this time we get a much healthier and stronger dose of moral goodness stuffed down our collective throats. This kind of thing was always cheesy, but here it's taken to absurdly dizzying heights, and I can't even take it anymore. In the first two movies, we got some similar ideologies, but never were they as fleshed out as they are here, and never were they as cliché and boring as they are here. In traditional SAW fashion, though, the final 20 minutes of the film are quite gripping and endearing, and at least the ending of this one is far better than the ending to the previous sequel, and I doubt most people expected it to end this way. There are indeed good things to be found here, but the problem is that they're buried beneath a rather sterile, pre-processed horror movie, a film that relies too much on special effects and trying to gross us out. I did give it a 3/5, though, as this movie is still genuinely watchable and on-par. It's just a severe disappointment.