John Kramer loves his traps. But he’s in a trap himself now, and it seems inescapable.
Kramer, aka Jigsaw, has always thought of himself as a teacher. Or maybe a very strict life coach. He kidnaps folks, straps them into lethal contraptions and (ahem) encourages them to change their evil ways. By forcing them to choose (often quite literally) between life and limb, Kramer hopes his pupils will appreciate that life all the more.
And if they choose death? Well, that’s their choice. Them’s the rules.
If cancer played by Kramer’s rules, John would happily give up a hand or eye or spleen to keep on breathing. But cancer doesn’t play fair: It offers no lever to push, no button to press, no limb to lose. John Kramer is dying. He can find no escape from this trap.
Can he?
One day, he spies a cancer-ridden friend of his—a terminal case who, oddly, looks very much alive. Not just alive, but healthy. The friend reveals that his cancer is complete remission. He owes it all to a mysterious medical group headed by a Dr. Pederson. And while their treatments are all experimental and a bit shady (at least as rival pharmaceutical companies are concerned), they worked for him.
And there it is: the lever.
John contacts Dr. Pederson and is welcomed into her treatment facility, now based in rural Mexico. Staff members whisk him into surgery the next day. And soon after Kramer wakes up—antiseptic bandages wrapped around his head—Dr. Pederson shows him some encouraging test results. The treatment, it appears, was a success.
But when Kramer returns to the compound to drop off a thank-you gift, he finds the place deserted. A bit of telltale evidence and a removed head-bandage later, and John realizes he’s been duped. His cancer’s still there: The only things gone are his would-be saviors. They stole his money, played on his hope and literally left him to die.
Cancer’s trap is brutal indeed. John now realizes that he won’t be able to wriggle out of it. But he’s got life in him yet, and he knows how to spend it.
Oh, yes. He knows. And soon, so will they. He’ll make sure that Dr. Pederson and her crew won’t cheat anyone else again.
Often, when you base a movie franchise around a villain (and if you give the series enough movies), that villain morphs into a hero. And it seems that the film’s makers are now positioning John Kramer as sort of a serial-killer Batman.
John is perhaps at his most human here. We see his love for life and his genuine gratitude to those whom (he believes) saved it. He even helps a little boy straighten a bicycle tire.
And he embraces his own strict, bloody form of morality. He’s a big believer in free will—and those who use that will to do evil should have a chance to see, and grapple with, the error of their ways. “This is not retribution,” he insists. “It’s a reawakening.”
Yes, he punishes those he sees as “sinners,” and he demands his pound of flesh (or in one case, his three ounces of marrow) for those sins. But if they pass his tests, he judges them redeemed. And he tells his dutiful assistant, Amanda, that “everyone deserves a chance at redemption.” When someone escapes one of his games, he’s quick to respond with a gentle touch, a first-aid kit and, if needed, a trip to the hospital.
He insists that he never kills anyone: It’s the victims themselves, and their lack of a will to live, that do the deed. That’s rather dubious logic (as we’ll see), but one cannot fault John for at least adhering to his own values. He sees himself only as an arbiter of justice, not a person consumed with arbitrary punishment.
And when an innocent person is trapped in one of John’s wicked devices, he’s horrified and acts in a surprisingly sacrificial manner.
Set in Mexico, the movie makes use of the country’s bloody Aztec roots. A taxi driver drives by a statue representing one of the Aztec’s bloody gods—set on the site of ancient human sacrifices—and describes what priests would do to their victims in lurid detail. An instrument of pain and death is designed to look like the face of, presumably, an Aztec god.
Words such as sin and redemption are used, and John tells at least one victim that he has the opportunity to save his soul.
One of John’s subjects, Valentina, is a prostitute (though John didn’t know that when he first met her; she was masquerading as a nurse). Dressed in a short skirt and fishnet stockings, Valentina flirts with a John in a noisy club. They walk outside and, when he motions for her to get into the car’s back seat, she demands money (to the apparent surprise of her mark). We see quite a bit of her thigh throughout her time on screen.
A man and woman are in a relationship, and we see them kiss and hold each other once or twice.
The paradox of writing Saw reviews can be found right here. Anyone who knows anything about these movies understands that they practically exist to coat the screen with blood and gore, which makes this section almost superfluous. And the chief “charm” of the films would seem to be the intricate, needlessly complicated traps that John Kramer creates. So be warned: This section is somewhat spoilery, too. Here we go.
The first trap we see (and the one that graces much of the film’s publicity material) is one that forces a subject to either turn a dial that’ll break all his fingers on one hand or suck out his eyeballs. The subject runs out of time after grotesquely breaking three fingers; then has his sight orbs vacuumed out to land in a waiting receptacle.
The movie’s double whammy of torture—you suffer so you won’t die, then die anyway—feels common here (and in others in the series). The traps force their subjects to mutilate their bodies horrifically; then after a “successful” mutilation, many are bloodily dispatched anyway, having failed to meet some minor clause in John Kramer’s unwritten contract. Not quite enough marrow is extracted in time. Not quite enough brain matter is removed. It’s another twist-of-the-knife in an already über-sadistic story.
A quick rundown of grotesqueries: Someone is beheaded. A leg is amputated. Someone saws into his own skull to remove a bit of brain. A hand and foot are both hideously smashed. One person is killed by a red-hot mask. A couple of folks are waterboarded with blood. Two others are subjected to a gas that kinda eats away skin. A victim—his hands temporarily replaced with scalpels—is forced to cut away a pair of bombs planted in his forearms. (Huge chunks of skin are removed during the extremely bloody procedure.) A radiation machine begins to melt the skin off of a subject. A contraption that looks like it’s literally designed to claw through someone’s stomach is turned on before the camera turns away. A character steps on someone’s neck and breaks it.
A corpse is cut open, and the intestines are removed … to be used as a makeshift rope. Someone is tasered. Someone else falls from a pretty significant height. A person is stabbed in the gut. A rather ancillary character is either killed or rendered unconscious by a gunshot or blow to the head. People get hit, tripped and thwacked in the face with bathroom doors and often rendered unconscious. A human face is apparently pealed from a corpse and used as a distraction. An explosive goes off.
John is partly awake during his brain surgery, and he sees what he believes to be his brain—and doctors cutting into that brain—on a video screen. He later discovers the same footage on a doctor’s training video. A man shows John a grotesque scar running down his abdomen. People hiding behind pigs’ faces run about, attack folks and generally look scary. Guns are pointed. People are pulled down and yanked up by chains.
Nearly 35 f-words, about four s-words and a use of he c-word. We also hear sporadic uses of “d–n” and “h—,” along with four misuses of God’s name.
One of John’s subjects is a drug addict. We see her get pills from someone who works in a vet’s office (who tells her that she needs to find another dealer) and take them in a dirty club bathroom. Her addiction makes her an object of relative pity for Amanda, who we learn (here and in other movies) was a drug addict before John offered her his painful cure.
A girl offers John a bottle of tequila before his surgery, “for luck.” John tries to return the favor by buying a bottle of what may be expensive cognac and taking it to the girl’s family house. A character drinks wine.
As mentioned, Dr. Pederson and her associates are charlatans. Dr. Peterson herself has been swindling the dying out of their money and hope for eight years, and she seems perhaps sociopathic in her lack of empathy (both in regard to her marks and her co-conspirators). She and her pals lie and cheat and steal, and she indeed does nearly the impossible—making John Kramer look good by comparison.
John and Amanda commit their own deceptions, of course. And John apparently has a police officer helpmate who has no qualms with John’s bloody methods of “justice.”
Some characters retch at the sight of John’s atrocities. I’m assuming that the movie’s makers hope that folks in the audience will do the same.
A hospital custodian rifles through the belongings of an unconscious patient and looks as though he’s ready to steal them. But he thinks better of it when he sees John watching him. “Good choice,” John says, as the custodian puts the belongings back.
Gothic writer Ann Radcliffe defined terror and horror as two very different—and indeed, nearly opposite—types of scares. “Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them.”
In his nonfiction book Danse Macabre, author Stephen King added another type: revulsion. “I recognize terror as the finest emotion … and so I will try to terrorize the reader,” he writes. “But if I find I cannot terrify him/her, I will try to horrify; and if I find I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud.”
Those distinctions are interesting when it comes to the Saw movies, and Saw X in particular. If we take John Kramer at his word, he seems to want to inspire terror in his subjects—a Radcliffe-ian form of fear that would awaken the facilities and expand the soul. But the movies that revolve around him can only, at their best, horrify—deadening, rather than expanding, the soul. And most often, they simply gross us out.
Admittedly, whatever grotesque charms that some find in Saw X elude me. I said so in a recent blog. Whatever moral posturing the film makes, Saw X glories in revulsion. It exults in human meat.
And the world exults right alongside it—gaining, it would seem, a greater appreciation for the gross-out. According to Rotten Tomatoes, the best Saw movie before now was still rotten, trundling in at a so-so 50%. The rest take a steep drop-off from there. But Saw X? It’s bona fide fresh at 85%, as I write. It seems much of our culture soaks up Jigsaw’s blood and, like fans in a Roman coliseum, screaming for more.
Saw X? I saw enough.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
