Overall a pretty tacky excuse to move from one sadistic, stomach-churning scene to another

Rating: 4/10 (28 November 2006)

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning
After taking care of two random victims, Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) goes in for the kill and traps Jeff (Angus Macfadyen) a man in a deep state of grief after losing his son in a drink driving accident. He sets him a series of challenges to save the lives of those caught up in his sons death (including a female driver who failed to stop and help, the judge who gave the killer a pathetic sentence, and finally, the killer himself) to test his resolve and to stop him languishing in a state of veangefulness. Meanwhile, he also takes Jeff's wife Lynn (Bahar Soometh) a brash doctor who pushes everyone away from her to operate on the tumour that is killing him, with the help of Amanda (Shawnee Smith) his former victim.
All three of the Saw movies have seemed to pride themselves more on delivering stomach-churning gore than genuine scares and they've reached a crescendo with Saw III, a truly nasty piece of work that reportedly had paramedics being called in to deal with fainting cinema-goers who couldn't handle the movie's sheer level of blood and gore. There's plenty of morbidly imaginative Hellraiser style death scenes on display that see some characters die some of the grusomest deaths imaginable (check out the terrifying looking thing the drunk driver is attached to at the end and the torture he is made to endure!), but it's actually the most realistic gory scene that proves the hardest to stomach, where a drill is used to go into Jigsaw's skull and operate on his brain. Somehow seeing the real sort of thing is even nastier than the most unpleasant death device the screen-writers could dream up.
Plot wise, the movie's pretty defunct. We open with two murders that bear no relevance to the 'story' that's about to unfold, which basically consists of moving from one gory set-piece to another in a none stop attempt to turn the stomachs of the viewers as much as possible. There seems to be some ridiculous rhyme and reason to Jigsaw's motives, wherein a sadistic killer tries to make a man feeling justifiable anger and vengeance get his humanity back as well as trying to get people to appreciate life by making them crawl and scream for it. There's some fairly good acting on display though, Macfadyen raw and determined as the tragic anti-hero as well as Bell's calm, rationalizing psychopath but, unlikely as it seems, one just hopes this is the last of the odious Saw movies before the series gets the chance to get anymore morally adventurous. **