REVIEW - "Saw IV" (2007)

I have seen hell—And it is the “Saw” series. Trust me, I wish this review was “Gone Baby Gone,” but alas, it is not. After being guilted in to seeing “Saw IV,” I begged the box office to tell me I was under aged. The guy laughed at me, knowing he didn’t need to see my ID anyway. So I waltz in to “Saw IV” trying to open my mind. Trying to convince myself maybe there will some good presented on the screen before me. It was not meant to be.

The “Saw” movies were bad from the beginning. The first one contradicted its message to value your life by spending less time on character-oriented narratives and more time on unique ways to torture people. Then, of course, there’s the twist that has nothing to do with what it’s trying to “preach” and everything about giving the audience a cheap thrill. The second movie, somehow, accomplished the incredible feat of being worse than the original. It was nothing but a retread on familiar territory and again it tries to trick its audience in to thinking it has some great meaning behind it. The message in these movies are so cliché and dumbed-down for the low-intelligence audience that enjoy them, that I wonder how you can miss the fact that the point of these movies is not to have meaning-- The point is to show as much blood and gore as possible without getting an NC-17 rating.

Now seeing as I already watched two of the worst movies ever made, I skipped out on “Saw III.” However, I knew enough about it to understand what was going on in “Saw IV.” Ten minutes in to the movie made me realize that I didn’t need to know anything about these movies in order to understand this one. The now dead “Jigsaw” is finding a way to manipulate people in to continuing his work. They keep the main villain in the film through a string of flashbacks that explain how he became the torture monger that he is. Meanwhile a cop gets tricked in to torturing people in order to save his partners’ lives and the FBI interrogate Jigsaw’s ex-wife to figure out who’s been committing the recent crimes.

The movie is about as contrived as you can get. How Jigsaw is able to calculate all these ridiculous strings of events borderlines a capability to see the future. The cop he manipulates, Riggs, goes on his own to find clues that lead him to torturing people. Why didn’t he go to the police first? In some cases we don’t know why it was necessary for him to torture people because we don’t know how that leads to the next clue. How did it? Anyone?

Of course, like all the “Saw” dreck, this movie throws out its “people are so ungrateful for their lives” line and begs the audience to consider if Jigsaw’s work is right or wrong. Easy. Wrong. There is nothing to compel me to believe that what Jigsaw does to people is a method making them enjoy life more. This movie is the least affective in that task. (It seems the message gets dumbed down more and more with each movie. Go figure.)

The “Saw” movies also seem to be ruining the definition of horror as well. Is it not the point for a horror movie to be scary? To give us real horror that makes us jump out of our seat? If so “Saw IV,” like its predecessors, fails miserably. The movie doesn’t have one scary moment in it. It’s just strings of grotesquery tied together and passed off as a coherent story.

At one point in the movie an FBI agent is told why Jigsaw began killing people. After he is told the story he announces, “I don’t buy it!” Neither do I. I didn’t buy the entire movie. For a film that tries to ground itself far enough in reality to be realistic with its gore and characters, it was hard to swallow. (Kind of like swallowing a tape whole. That’s right. He does it!) The end of the film offers the obligatory “Saw” twist that is even more of an invitation to a sequel than any of the previous “Saw” movies. It is at that point I realized I watched an hour and a half commercial for “Saw V.” If I were a fan of these movies (hysterical thought) I would feel very cheated. The next time Jigsaw says, “I want to play a game.” I’ll pass. And then I’ll wonder why Circuit City wasn’t curious as to why a single person bought their entire inventory of tapes.

0 out of ****