Better than both Saw 1 and 2, but...

Rating: 4/10 (4 March 2007)

During the time I was watching this movie, I was fidgeting in my seat almost the whole time.
Because it was scary? No. Because of the five billion ways of torture that is visualized. Not really.
To me, Saw has become a series that walks back and forth in its own footsteps; trying so desperately to shock that it fails. This time it's ten times the gore and ten times the pain and somehow I feel that it overshadows the good part of this movie - the parts that makes it a bit different from the other two.
The movie starts with the usual "hey ho, Jigsaw's killing again" where different kinds of funky ways to kill a person are displayed. This is basically just a gore fest which doesn't bring anything to the movie except for being simply that. Gore.
This time, Jigsaw (with help from Amanda) kidnaps a nurse, who is meant to help him survive while he's helping some other poor, lost soul finding meaning in life. Truth is, I enjoyed watching the conversation between the three of them far more than the actual process of the game. Most of the time I was simply wishing for the movie to speed up a little because watching a man deciding what he should do for several minutes is hardly entertaining; at least not in this kind of movie.
I won't say it's all bad. In fact, it's better than both the first and second one. Why? First of all it has character development. An important element which was slightly forgotten in Saw 1 and, mainly, Saw 2. Secondly, the plot is better. People's reasons for doing certain things are more logical and they put in a couple of unexpected twists which makes it a whole lot more interesting. The third reason is that the actors are better. Saw 2 was, in my opinion, a disaster in that area and thankfully they seemed to pick their actors more wisely this time.
Despite all the efforts to make the characters human, this movie bored me. Most of the time it felt like nothing really happened, despite the makes of the movie actually moving the concept up a notch.
The problem with Saw is that the unexpected becomes expected and when a movie depends upon it as much as this movie does, it just ends up being boring and predictable.
But if you can get through the first 20 minutes of utter blah, you have an interesting movie that, unfortunately, is slightly ruined by the fact that it is too similar to the older, less good, ones.