Saw VI

Rating

Director

Kevin Greutert

Screenplay

Marcus Dunston, Patrick Melton

Length

90 min.

Starring

Tobin Bell, Costas Mandylor, Shawnee Smith, Betsy Russell, Peter Outerbridge, Larissa Gomes, Mark Rolston, Tanedra Howard

MPAA Rating

R for sequences of grisly bloody violence and torture, and language

Review

With a steady decline in quality and the typical tendency of the genre to fade in latter installments, Saw VI is a surprising entry into the long-running annual torture horror series.

As with all the previous installments, the sixth revolves around plots and games set up by the enigmatic Jigsaw “killer” (Tobin Bell) who succumbed to his brain tumor in an earlier episode. However, a box bequeathed to his widow Jill Tuck (Betsy Russell) in Saw V set up the final confrontation between John Kramer (a.ka. Jigsaw) and one of his protégés, Mark Hoffman (Costas Mandylor), a man who claimed that he didn’t need to be tested; however, anyone knowing the series fairly well would recognize those words as particularly foolhardy.

This time around, Kramer is targeting an old adversary, William Easton (Peter Outerbridge), a health insurance claims executive who denied him access to an experimental procedure that might have cured his cancer. The subject is of particular relevance given today’s debate over health care coverage in the United States. Other territories might not be so easily entertained by this project, which is one of its more obvious faults.

Even considering that, it’s hard for an American viewer not to feel a certain bit of grim satisfaction in everything this despicable man has to go through in order to atone for his actions. It’s one of the things that makes this particular episode more entertaining than it otherwise would have been.

The performances haven’t improved. Most of the actors just scream and run, panic and plead, and there’s little emotional attachment given to them except in the case of a wife and mother whose fate is entirely in Easton’s hand. Unfortunately, it’s not her performance that makes it minimally evocative, it’s the general scene and the game being played at that instant.

The torture devices implemented in this edition aren’t that much more inventive than its predecessors, though the merry-go-round is clever enough. It has become part of the regular expectation to find new devices, new situations and new twists, many of which conjure up images of previous entities thus diminishing part of the fun of the film.

Director Kevin Greutert and screenwriters Marcus Dunston and Patrick Melton aren’t capable of crafting much in the way of originality. They can evoke certain feelings in their audiences, but they aren’t able to understand just how to make a film unique enough to stand on its own. Minimal recaps at the beginning of the film only give a slight nod to the previous film in the series, but unless you’ve seen all of them already, you will end up completely lost within minutes.

That’s not to say it’s not as enjoyable as typical for the genre. There’s grim satisfaction when particularly irritating characters are put through the ringer and ultimately destroyed, but those feelings are limited since you can’t really get an understanding for their motivations, thus slightly diminishing the schadenfreude. And that’s the key reason this film series has succeeded so long. While in reality the psychological enjoyment taken from others’ misfortunes is more limited, on the big screen, we’re able to allow that side of us free because none of it’s real.

Saw VI takes that concept and really pulls it to the forefront, making a political statement at the same time as attempting to entertain. And for the most part, we’re sucked into it. But, that’s not to say everyone will be able to enjoy the film. Those who have a hard time with this type of visceral torture will be turned off by the film’s graphic nature. And that’s not the audience the film is intended for, which is why we will always see films of this nature making splashes at the box office. Long after Saw has faded into memory like Child’s Play or Hellraiser, there will be more and they will be more graphic and they will push envelopes just as Psycho, Rosemary’s Baby, Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street all did before them.

Review Written

October 29, 2009