Review of Jigsaw (2017) by Garry A — 16 Jan 2018

Almost entirely without merit, and the 'almost' adverb in that statement is only justified by the thankfully brief running time. If you are going to reanimate the withering corpse of a long-dead franchise, it's probably wiser to wait for an original idea, a decent script, and not just piece together (ironically) concepts from past instalments, and not in a knowingly self-aware way. The entire plot is pretty much ripped entirely from one of the earlier films, changing only the chief protagonist and trying to sell it as a 'twist'.

There is literally no redeeming aspect here - the cast are uniformly awful, and when the guy who played the crappier 'Ray' in classic TV series 'Due South' (Callum Keith Rennie) is your lead, you begin to realise why more talented young actors gave the project a wide berth. The script is an utter clunker (characters are established, then disappear entirely from the rest of the film), full of cliches with some woeful lines of dialogue that make no sense at all ("So it's a copycat then? Jigsaw died ten years ago?") and that is when you can even *hear* what is being said! Unfortunately the film has such poor sound design, that as soon as anything happens on screen, everything is drowned out by screams and background ambience. When you look at the talent behind the scenes though, you begin to appreciate why on both counts. It was written by the guy behind Piranha 3D and directed by a pair of Austrian twins with a handful of films in their back catalogue.

Unfortunately, somehow, this monstrosity did decent business at the box office (oddly enough when your film costs peanuts to make, and relies on a franchise name to sell tickets you can make a lot of money) so we will no doubt be seeing more of this tired series. Awful.