Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on October 24, 2008, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
The biggest problem with Saw V, when you get right down to it, is that it’s Saw V. The franchise is now past the point where a new installment can conceivably offer anything new while still staying true to its predecessors, and the result is a movie that feels like a placeholder till part six comes out a year from now. (At least one significant plot thread is left dangling and unresolved when V is over, as if to assure there’ll be butts in seats come next Halloween.)
Saw V is not quite as befuddling as Saw IV, with its head-spinning final series of parallel flashbacks, but it’s even more dependent on revisiting scenes from Jigsaw’s past. The intent is to shed more light on the villain’s methods and motivations, but it largely comes off as a contrived excuse to keep signature actor Tobin Bell involved. By now, there’s very little that the movies can tell us about him, and the new characters who take center stage don’t take up the slack.
When last we left this saga, it had been revealed that FBI agent Hoffman (Costas Mandylor) has been in cahoots with Jigsaw all along, and a detective named Strahm (Scott Patterson) was hot on his trail. Before it can rejoin these two, of course, Saw V must open with a new deadly-trap setpiece, in this case one inspired by Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” (and it’s surprising it took the Saw team this long to adopt that classic torture scenario). Soon thereafter, it’s Strahm’s turn to get strapped into a death device, and the way in which he gets through it is the film’s one startling surprise.
After that, the movie falls quickly into autopilot mode, as flashbacks of how Hoffman came to be Jigsaw’s pupil are intercut with Strahm’s determined investigation to figure out who the madman’s accomplice might be. This mostly consists of Strahm poring through files, and asking himself expositional questions and making deductive statements out loud. Meanwhile, we learn (SPOILER ALERT) that it was Hoffman who crafted that pendulum setpiece to exact revenge on the killer of his sister, in order to make it look like Jigsaw’s work. After Jigsaw abducts him for a bit of heart-to-heart at shotgunpoint, Hoffman is subsequently seen taking part in the villain’s earliest exploits, which begs the question of how the agent was able to emulate crimes that hadn’t yet occurred.
A bigger problem is that way too much of Saw V is devoted to revisiting scenes we’ve already seen in the other entries. With Jigsaw’s m.o. and philosophy well-established by now, the only thing to be learned here is that there was another person looking on as the victims met their fates, and the only thing fans might be impressed by is how seamlessly the newly shot footage matches the clips from the previous movies. But we’ve been through this process once before with Amanda (Shawnee Smith, who turns up very briefly in the new film), and there’s no suspense or surprise in watching Hoffman go through it again.
Oh yes, there are also a bunch of new captives forced to run through a survival gamut in a subplot that plays like an afterthought. With the exception of a reporter played by 24’s Carlo Rota, who exits the scene too early, none of these people exhibit any personality, and the reasons behind their imprisonment and torment are laughably pedestrian (something to do with construction contracts for a new stadium). Worse yet, this is the first time in Saw film history where there are easily discerned methods by which the doomed souls can escape their fates, which the survivors only figure out long after any attentive viewer has.
Director David Hackl, the sequels’ production designer until now, shoots it all with the gloom and grit familiar from the other Saws, though he lacks prior director Darren Lynn Bousman’s knack for interesting visual transitions. Nor does he have much of a touch with actors, as Mandylor underacts, Patterson overacts and Betsy Russell, back briefly as Jigsaw’s wife Jill, looks like she’s wondering what her own point is in the proceedings. Scripters Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan, who also penned IV and the upcoming VI, similarly maintain the franchise’s thematic consistency, at least. But there’s little they can do to breathe life into a movie that has nothing to do but spend 90 minutes justifying its own existence. It all leads, of course, to the Big Payoff, a concluding whammy of the sort that helped give the first Saw such buzz and has become its follow-ups’ signature. It’s even the focal point of the ads for Saw V: “You won’t believe how it ends,” they proclaim. This time, unfortunately, the real question is whether you will care.
