Posted: 10/29/2006

Saw III

(2006)

by Aaron Riccio

This new Jigsaw is a real bitch. Literally. In Saw III, Amanda (Shawnee Smith), once a victim herself, has taken up the gruesome, game-playing mantle of Jigsaw, creating clever contraptions that test a person’s will to live through pain and suffering. But Amanda isn’t interested in the old Jigsaw’s (Tobin Bell) tests: in her world, just because you plunge your hand into a vat of acid so that you can unlock the harness that’s seconds away from ripping your spinal cord apart … that doesn’t mean you should live. And should you manage to rip all the thick ringlets out of your skin before the bomb in the room explodes, you’ll find that the door has been soldered shut. Sucks to be you.

After these establishing deaths (horror “street cred,” as it were), Saw III focuses on what makes a person work for the man who placed a reverse bear trap in their mouth and the key to its lock in the stomach of a drugged but otherwise very much alive person. A series of flashbacks (that include former cast members Leigh Whannell and Donnie Wahlberg) give closure to all the storylines and set up one final test. Luckily for us (and unluckily for everyone else), John is still alive, and this last game, played from his deathbed, is a killer. Fans—you won’t be disappointed. Saw III is as sick as it is slick.

The game is very simple: Lynn (Bahar Soomekh) has been kidnapped and a bullet-studded collar has been placed around her neck. If she can keep the original Jigsaw alive long enough for another prisoner, Jeff (Angus Macfadyen), to complete his test, she’ll be set free. If not, and John’s brain tumor explodes, then Lynn’s head will explode as well. Both director Darren Lynn Bousman and writers Leigh Whannell and James Wan have been here before, so although the narrative splits between Lynn, Jeff, and Amanda’s flashbacks, the film zips from set piece to set piece, leaving pieces of human flesh where they fall. Among the many things to look forward to—if you go to see a filthy, morbid film like this, you must look forward to seeing blood (oh yes, there will be blood)—is an emergency cranial surgery, an encounter with a machine called “the rack,” and somewhere in the middle of all that, a moral lesson about forgiveness. Make no mistake, Bousman and Whannell are still just as crude, they’re just really clever about it.

Now psychological horror is a very particular niche. You know it’s going to come down to a climactic coup de grace, and you know that somehow the narratives are going to resolve themselves. If you’re watching Saw III, you really just want to know how these people are going to die, and how these seemingly unrelated events are going to come together. So long as you don’t mind checking your disbelief at the door (sort of a necessity for these films), Saw III gets the job done. And, after a grim little chuckle, you may even find that it was worth the price of admission.

Aaron Riccio is a film and theatre critic living in New York City.

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