Seeing “Saw IV” was a life-changing experience for me, and in all the wrong ways.
For some nerds that movie is “Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace.” For others it’s “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” or “Man of Steel.”
You know what I mean. That movie that had you super pumped because it was expected to take a franchise you loved in an exciting new direction. Then you saw it and were disappointed — the quality was so low that there was practically nothing you could enjoy commenting on. The characters you loved from previous movies were ruined, and the new ones they added weren’t compelling at all. The writing was flat. The tone was off. The big set pieces couldn’t rise to the franchise standard. The entire series — every movie that preceded it — seemed to have been cheapened in retrospect as a result of the new entry.
Bluntly put: It sucked. Hard.
“Saw IV” was that movie for me. It was my “Phantom Menace,” my “Crystal Skull,” my “Man of Steel.” It’s one of the only films I’ve ever seen in theaters twice and the first I ever saw in an auditorium completely alone, without any companion to join me (a practice that has since become common for me as a professional film critic).
It was also, for me, the quintessential 2007 movie.
Autumn 2007 saw me in a very different place in my life than the one in which I had found myself one year earlier. In Autumn 2006, I had graduated from Bard College in three years instead of the traditional four, impressing those around me with my seeming purposeful life but which wore me down with overwork until I succumbed to depression and malaise. By Autumn 2007 I had been forced to drop out of American University’s graduate school after collapsing from exhaustion, couldn’t force myself to do my studies and eventually made a suicide attempt. Life didn’t feel worth living, so I stopped going to classes, gorged on junk food and became so withdrawn that I was fired from my job at the college library. In later years I’d realize that I was simply experiencing the same problems that many neurodivergent individuals endure when trying to “make it” in a neurotypical world. At the time all I knew was that I was a failure, one who couldn’t even keep menial jobs and whose great dream was out of reach.
I wanted to be a writer, you see, and instead I was piled up to my neck with busy work. By the time “Saw IV” hit theaters, life had managed to place me in the clutches of a torturously banal and Kafka-esque bureaucratic gig at the Department of Veterans Affairs. I pretended to know what I was doing, but in fact was terrible at my job; I couldn’t force my obsessive, anxious, easily distracted mind to focus on my responsibilities, and so instead spent eight hours a day for several months simply hoping my inability to be productive wouldn’t get recognized. After I was finished with these regular failures, I rushed home to a lonely, dirty and cramped basement apartment in the New Jersey town of Montclair, where I was effectively trapped because my disability prevents me from driving. My social life consisted mainly of public transportation treks to upstate New York – where my girlfriend at the time and half of my friends, all Bard College students as I had once been (and should have still been), resided – and all-too-rare forays to Easton, PA, where the other half of my social circle could be found. The rest of my days were spent watching movies, reading, writing for a blog that no one read and in general wasting time.
Remember: I am a writer. I can’t help but surround myself by writing, whether on the screen or on the stage or on the page. To be deprived of good writing in my surroundings is unimaginable. When I’m not writing at all myself, I feel as my life has no purpose; when I am writing but not being published and widely read, I feel like that purpose is being squandered in what the Roman poet Ovid once metaphorically described as a state of “dancing in the dark.” This, by far, was the worst thing about 2007 for me: I was dancing in the dark, unable to fulfill my most basic psychic needs and being regarded as a failure by myself and others in the process.
The soap opera geek shows in “Saw,” “Saw II” and “Saw III” proved a healthy distraction to all of this. What some viewed as sadistic blood and gore, I saw as a cathartic morality play that at least added an ethical logic to a world of chaos. If life is going to be cruel anyway, shouldn’t it at least be direct and make sense?
I had loved each movie in the original “Saw” trilogy. The first (directed by Leigh Whannell in 2004) was a smaller film, focusing on two characters in a simple set up with a standard crime narrative in the background that built toward a doozy of a twist ending. The second (directed by Darren Lynn Bousman in 2005) is the best of the franchise, juggling several compelling character studies in a tense yet intimate scenario reminiscent of booby-trap themed horror films like “Cube” (directed by Vincenzo Natali in 1997). It also had an aesthetic that gave the movie a grungry, experimental vibe, making it feel more stylistically and tonally distinct than any other entry in the series. Many of the franchise’s most memorable scares came from this installment: The trap where you have to cut out your eyeball to survive, or be plunged into a pit of hypodermic needles to find a hidden key, or reach through razor blades to access the antidote to a poison. “Saw III” (also directed by Bausman, this time in 2006) was the most poignant movie of the series — perhaps a tad too much at times, leading to some maudlin moments — and had many great scares, memorable traps and strong character moments, working as an insightful look at the terrible toll that grief can take on warping its victims’ psyches. It was a step down from “Saw II” but had enough quality drama and scares to be worth checking out.
That’s one reason why was I so eager for “Saw IV,” certainly more so than any other movie coming out that year. The other is that, as I mentioned before, the year itself was 2007. The mere prospect of “Saw IV” seemed to perfectly fit the ethos of 2007 for me. The original trilogy had been a surprisingly insightful look at how Nietzschean ideas of the ‘superman’ would work if applied to contemporary American archetypes. We often talk about the workaholic, the unfeeling doctor, the repeat penal offender, and the junkie as being ‘wastes of space’ – but if that really were true, in its most literal sense, would Jigsaw’s logical extrapolation of what should be done to ‘fix’ the people who don’t appreciate their own lives be that far off the mark?”
All of the original trilogy was character-based… and forced those characters to live worthy lives or else punished them harshly. Perhaps I felt I also deserved to be punished, that my 2007 life was unworthy because I had dropped out of graduate school, had failed to achieve my great career ambition, was growing apart from my girlfriend and close friends and was working a banal job that I could barely cling to because of my neurodivergent behaviors? Or maybe I felt the perpetrators of these cruelties against me — the sadistic God who made me disabled and the injustice of a society that punished me for that — in reality needed to be punished, perhaps by some entity even more powerful than God with the moral sensibilities of the Jigsaw Killer? Or maybe graphic suffering in a horror genre context was simply cathartic for me, much like fantasy and romantic novels are for others?
Either way: There I was, watching “Saw IV” in theaters during Halloween season 2007, the first time I had ever seen a movie in theaters without company. My then-girlfriend, myself, and several other friends had decided to see a different movie. While I don’t remember the picture they chosen, I didn’t care. I had been eagerly awaiting the sequel to “Saw III” for a year, even more so after I read that it would bring resolution to the story arcs left over since the denouement of “Saw II.”
This optimism proved to be a mistake for a number of reasons:
– I had already agreed to see “Saw IV” with a co-worker on a separate occasion, one who shared my interest in the franchise. Since I didn’t know at that time if I would enjoy the movie, it was a serious lapse in financial judgment to commit myself to spending money on tickets for it twice unless I knew I was going to like it.
– The only quality scene in “Saw IV” was its very beginning. After witnessing the death of the titular Jigsaw Killer (Tobin Bell) at the end of the previous film, audiences were wondering if the baddie would somehow be brought back to life in its successor. This seemed unlikely, given how that would require supernatural development in a franchise that has always kept its feet planted on the ground, but how else could the series continue? “Saw IV” partially answers that right out of the gate by confirming that Jigsaw is quite dead in the most decisive way possible: We graphically witness his autopsy, with the viscera in bright read contrasted against the desaturated background of the hospital room. A tape discovered in the mastermind’s stomach promises that his work will continue after death, though, piquing our interest.
– After that, though, we are left with the most rote plot of the entire series. Agents Peter Strahm (Scott Patterson) and Lindsey Perez (Athena Karkanis) must rescue the one surviving main protagonist from “Saw II,” Detectives Eric Matthews (Donnie Wahlberg), along with his colleague Mark Hoffman (Costas Mandylor) from a Jigsaw trap. As they do so Matthews’ ex-colleague and friend, Officer Daniel Rigg (Lyriq Bent), find himself seemingly groomed by the Jigsaw himself to inherit his mantle, witnessing a series of increasingly gruesome tests in which he must decide others’ fates rather than being tested himself. Jigsaw attempts to impart his philosophical teachings to the unwilling Rigg… but does he even have a lesson to learn? In Rigg’s case, does he have a thesis to ply?
– That’s the underlying problem with “Saw IV.” It has traps that focus more on gore than wit, symbolism or philosophical meaning, a fact punctuated by how Rigg’s supposedly major character flaw doesn’t rise to the level of those of others who have been run through the Jigsaw gauntlet. He isn’t a cold, arrogant and self-involved doctor, a hot-headed and crooked cop or a grieving father whose personality has been twisted by a craving for revenge. He simply wants to do his job and find other missing cops and victims so he can save lives. While it’s clear why Jigsaw might see this as a personal threat, it’s hard to imagine rationalizing dedication to the noble aspects of one’s job as a failure to “cherish your life,” as the film puts it. Without this compelling underlying narrative, the trap sequences that follow lack any linking thread to give them larger significance. Instead we are left with the gore of the traps, the ingenuity (or lack therefore) in their design and Bausman’s increasingly distracting flashy directing style (what worked when practiced moderately in “Saw II” becomes unbearable by “Saw IV”).
– The film also ruins two of the franchise’s best characters. The Jigsaw Killer already had a compelling backstory established from the first three films, yet tacks on an additional subplot here that adds nothing to either his motives or our understanding of the character. Another venerable character from series was barely in the movie before being given an unceremonious death. These details, more than anything else, left me feeling the same way “Star Wars” fans did in 1999, “Indiana Jones” fans did in 2008 and “Superman” fans would in 2013… deeply empty inside.
– As for the series’ iconic twist ending? There are two here. The first involves connecting the timeline of “Saw IV” with other films in the series and is modestly clever. The second suffered from being foreseeable — fans had correctly surmised that the new movie would reveal an heir to Jigsaw’s legacy, and process of elimination among the plausible alternatives made it pretty easy to guess who that would be. Those guesses were accurate.
Of course, it would have been rude of me to welsh on seeing “Saw IV” again with my co-worker, so I had to watch it again. On two occasions I paid for a movie ticket to see a spiritually hollow, unpleasant misery of a film from a series that that had once helped me better understand and escape from real life’s many spiritually hollow and unpleasant miseries. The sick irony did not escape me during either viewing.
I’ve decided that I’m not going to write about any of the other past “Saw” movies after this review. The first “Saw” movie was a solid horror thriller, the second was a masterpiece of in the Grand Guignol tradition, the third was an uneven mess held together by a powerful central character tragedy and “Saw V” (2008) and “Saw VII” (2010) were both completely forgettable. I have already written a “Jigsaw” (2017) review (I was a professional critic by that point and it was the latest big theatrical release at the time) and made a point of praising “Saw VI” (2009) in a review because its poignant plot, clever pacing, ingenious characterizations and boldly socialist message makes it my favorite of the series. This is about all of the “Saw” I can handle, at least as a movie critic.
And now you know how I feel about “Saw IV.” It was a bad movie overall, but it perfectly captured the zeitgeist of a terrible year through its awfulness. If the essence of 2007 is captured by any one film, at least in terms of my life at the time, it’s “Saw IV.”