After that brief interlude with Hostel, the main event of Saw-mhain returns with Saw III, a movie I may have seen before? Lot of half-formed memories, which means either I picked up details through osmosis or I had watched it and it just didn’t stick. And after watching/rewatching, it honestly could be either. This wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t super.
The movie opens with Detective Eric Matthews smashing his foot and ankle to get out of his chains. Recap? I hardly know her! Months later he’s still missing, worrying Detective Kerry. Hey, she’s still a character! For now, at least. She’s at the scene of Jigsaw’s latest trap: a guy had chains embedded in his flesh and had to rip them all out before a bomb went off, but he was too slow. Kerry points out that the exit was welded shut, meaning that even if he had quickly mutilated himself, he had no chance to escape. Hm, I wonder if Jigsaw is outsourcing… And then Kerry’s story comes to an end when she’s captured by Amanda and put in a similarly hopeless trap. Key in a jar of acid, lock wouldn’t open, her ribs are ripped open, you know the drill.
Now onto our new protagonists! First we have Lynn (Bahar Soomekh), a doctor going through serious relationship problems that are affecting her work. She’s captured by Amanda and brought to the dying John Kramer, who seriously needs medical attention but won’t go to a hospital because of the whole, you know, wanted by law enforcement thing. Bombs are strapped to Lynn’s neck and if Kramer flatlines, they go off and kill her. The other, completely unrelated protagonist is Jeff (Angus Macfadyen), a father mourning the death of his son and largely ignoring his daughter. He’s put into what the movie wants us to believe could be Jigsaw’s final trap: will Jeff save the people tangentially involved in his son’s death and the killer’s light sentence, or will he show mercy?
So the games have begun. Plural? Surely I just made a mistake. While Lynn does her best job at trying to relieve pressure on Jigsaw’s brain, Amanda is getting more and more agitated seeing him be nice to the doctor. Doesn’t help when Kramer has visions of a past love and mistakes Lynn for her. We also see some flashbacks letting us know that not only was Amanda the one who kidnapped Adam–hi there, cameo of Leigh Whannell–but she suffocated him to death after Dr. Gordon escaped. Mercy killing? Tying up loose ends? Ensuring no one escapes? Why not all of the above. She also found Matthews after he escaped, but while she says she killed the cop, Jigsaw says he cleaned up her mess, implying Matthews is still alive. Over with Jeff, he fails to rescue a woman who saw his son’s accident and just drove off–she freezes to death–but saves the judge in the case from drowning in liquid pig guts. Gross! Then he comes face to face with his son’s killer, who was built up as a callous murderer but is actually a young man who made a horrible mistake he very much regrets. He’s hooked up to a device that twists his limbs until they snap, and Jeff is too slow to save him. He even accidentally kills the judge via another trap! Dude, you really suck at this. But he’s faced his tests and is able to escape, leading to…
The cavalcade of twists! Lynn is actually Jeff’s estranged wife, meaning the guy we saw her sleeping with at the beginning was just some random fuckboy! Amanda reveals she doesn’t want people to escape these traps, believing none of them actually have changed since she apparently hasn’t! But seeing if she’d keep Lynn alive was Jigsaw’s test for Amanda, which she’s clearly failed! Jeff fails his final test by killing Jigsaw for the horrors the man put him through, which means Lynn dies! And with Jigsaw dead, now no one knows the location of Jeff and Lynn’s daughter, meaning her inevitable death is also on Jeff’s hands!
You would think the film combining directing by Darren Lynn Bousman and writing by the series’ creators, Leigh Whannell and James Wan, would be… more impactful, I guess. Jigsaw is still a deeply flawed man who believes himself to be one step ahead of everyone, but he’s utterly failed by entrusting his mission to Amanda. She’s impetuous, overly aggressive, and sloppy, confirming what I already knew by explicitly saying the key to Adam’s chains going down the drain at the start of Saw was her mistake.
But really, Saw III feels like an ending to the series. The creators came back and not only killed Jigsaw and Amanda, but wrapped up most plot threads. And thus, the Saw franchise comes to a close.
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WHAT DO YOU MEAN THERE ARE SEVEN MORE OF THESE?! Christ Almighty, these are going to get real bad, aren’t they…?
Previous: Saw II (2005)
Next: Saw IV (2007)
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