Review of Saw 3D (2010) by Shiira — 01 Nov 2010

It should've been Jill(Betsy Russell), not Mark(Costas Mandyor), a serial killer with no showmanship, no panache, who should have carried on Jigsaw's work as a good samaritan. (He's getting rid of a**holes, right?) But in "Saw III", the batty moralist dies.

Maybe "Saw" shot its wad too soon, killing off John(Tobin Bell) in the midst of a then-wildly popular franchise, leaving the keys to the kingdom in Mark's hands, leaving "Saw" in a lurch.

Without having seen all seven(!!!) films, my guess is that Jigsaw was better alive than dead, a proactive character with a puppet who would look more at home with the cast of Peter Jackson's "Meet the Feebles" than Jim Henson's Muppets.

More than John, Mark needs that puppet; he'd be nothing without that male ventriloquist's dummy. The man is a cipher, when you compare this dirty cop with other iconic villains from other popular horror movie franchises.

Must we name names? Well, for starters, Freddy Krueger didn't need no stinkin' traps to be interesting. "Saw" made a mistake in that third installment, which probably cost them at the box office in the long run.

After the father of a kidnapped daughter runs a skill saw across Jigsaw's throat, the series could have gone in two directions. (Both more interesting than its chosen path.) Since the puppet, not the puppetmaster, is the films' lasting icon, why not consolidate the two and have Jigsaw calling the shots as a reanimated insentient toy(a soul transference closer to the spirit of Richard Attenborough's "Magic" than Tom Holland's "Child's Play", since the former also featured a ventriloquist's dummy, whereas Chucky was a doll), with Jill, playing the Anthony Hopkins role, in which you're not sure if it's her, or the doll, doing the manipulating.

The second scenario would have been an ever greater improvement, especially when applied to "Saw: 3D", a film that's all rote murder and no surprises. This scenario doesn't exclude Mark; he could kill some, but just don't leave ALL the killing to him.

Make Mark the second copycat. Like the Jonas Ackerland-directed music video for The Prodigy's "Smack My **** Up", "Saw: 3D" could have used the short form music video's first-person approach to conceal the trap designer's identity, especially her sex.

In "Smack My **** Up", the aggressive behavior on part of the unseen person suggests we're watching a man. To find out that the agitator is female, is a shock. Having two psychos help account for the moral inconsistencies of the one-man judge and jury, Mark, who in one instance, takes the skinheads trapping(David Lowery of Camper Van Beethoven "Take the Skinheads Bowling" instead), then in the same breath, has no qualms about involving a complete innocent like the author's wife, who had no inclination that her husband lied about being a Jigsaw survivor.

Like Ellen Page in David Slade's "Hard Candy", Mark doesn't care if the skinheads hate minorities, both he and Hayley Stark(she doesn't really care if the pedophile, played by Patrick Wilson, f*cks underaged girls) just get off on torturing people.

(Look at the poster for "Hard Candy", it's very "Saw"-like.) "Saw: 3D" just simply thinks too highly of itself. The final installment of this pioneering torture-porn series insists on mythologizing itself by returning Dr.

Lawrence Gordon(Cary Elwes) to that warehouse bathroom like it was a paramountcy moment, on par with Luke Skywalker first arriving at Tatooine in George Lucas' "Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith", rather than honoring the most important horror trope of them all: the "final girl".

As the final girl, Jill is supposed to own the pleasure of killing the killer, but no, torture porn plays by its own rules, having little regard for the old school template of the pre-"Hostel" days that served a film like John Carpenter's "Halloween", and others, so well, because Mark grabs hold of Jill, seats our heroine, and rips her face open with a bear trap.