Movie Review #11

Saw V

Shock Value: 25 of 33
Queasiness: 33 of 33
Suspense: 22 of 33
Total Scare: 85 of 100

Personally this is probably my second favorite movie in the series. While the story is no longer very suspenseful (the franchise uses the same formula for each movie...although each gets it's own twist ending you should know what to expect by now in pacing, deaths, gore, character and so on.)

The movie begins with a “jigsaw trap” - the pendulum and the man in the trap dies before he escapes. This is the first movie where jigsaw is actually dead all the way through...and Hoffman is the main villain. We see in this movie his involvement with jigsaw from the beginning. How did Jigsaw move all those bodies around if he's such an old guy? Well – he had Hoffman helping him.

In this movie Hoffman focuses his attention on the latest game – four rooms that house five people. They must complete each trap in each room before a certain time (when nail bombs explode killing anyone left in the room). At the beginning they are told “You will want to do one thing, but I implore you to do the other.” In the last room there is two survivors who discover that all five of them could have made it out...if only they had worked together. This is the theme that I love so much about this movie. While their reason for being in this trap is still vague at the end of the movie (They claim that they were all involved in destroying a building while there were still people living inside...none of them were punished for it...but how does Jigsaw know about this? What does he care?) their success is overshadowed by the larger plot of the movie – Hoffman is being chased down by agent Straum from the FBI.

Hoffman leads him ever closer and when Straum finds him he is told to get inside a glass coffin with broken glass on the inside – it's his only way out. Straum ignores the advice, and Hoffman ends up in the coffin...the room is one big compactor and crushes Straum, but Hoffman is spared. It seems like Hoffman gets away, for now.

My least favorite trap in this movie is the room with the glass bottles that hold the keys to the cells. It's a little too obvious that they could have all survived that one...but the resulting mess is quite stimulating...

Jill Tuck gets her character fleshed out – we see her relationship with John (before he formally became Jigsaw) and we also see her receive a mysterious box... Hoffman's escape and Jill's mystery box are a great ending. While we never learn about what happened to the survivors of the game we realize it doesn't really matter – their test was unique and they failed to see the answer before three of them had died.