Movie Info
Movie Name: Saw V
Studio: Twisted Pictures
Genre(s): Horror
Release Date(s): October 24, 2008
MPAA Rating: R
It’s a dick in a box!
Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) might be dead but that doesn’t mean his games are over. His follower Detective Mark Hoffman (Costas Mandylor) has his own series of twisted games to conduct and with Hoffman’s new players, he’s got a lot of blood to spill. Ashley (Laura Gordon), Brit (Julie Benz), Mallick (Greg Bryk), Charles (Carlo Rota), and Luba (Meagan Gibbs) find themselves caught in a Jigsaw trap and working together might be the only means to escape. Meanwhile Agent Peter Strahm (Scott Patterson) has managed to survive Jigsaw’s puzzle through his own ingenuity, and he suspects Jigsaw has an accomplice. Can he track down and expose Hoffman before it is too late?
Directed by David Hackl, Saw V is a horror torture movie. Following Saw IV in 2007, the movie showed a slip in the box office coming in second in its release, and like many of the sequels, Saw V received negative reviews.
Hey…remember that perfectly good, full of blood body we left in the other room…maybe we should have thought of that…
Saw has never been my favorite series, but I do commend some of the ingenuity of the series. With each entry, the story has been advanced, and Saw V continues this tradition…but Saw V is also one of the weaker entries in the series.
The whole plot of Saw has kind of been in question for me as the series rolled out. As Jigsaw tested people who were morally bankrupt, the series starts to dip into people simply going overboard in their convictions. Characters like Strahm aren’t bad cops. They do their job and they follow leads…and Strahm is killed for it. Yes, he doesn’t follow Jigsaw’s instructions, but does he deserve to die? It isn’t the same as characters who deserve punishment for acts that went unpunished.
The killing of Jigsaw provides a problem. Tobin Bell was rather in descript as the prime killer for the first films, but his normalcy was party of the Saw motif. He was just a guy who was trying to right the wrongs of society. His means were twisted, but overall, they weren’t something that was unwarranted (and you could argue that his sickness combined with his rage led to an unjustified attack on others who abused the system). Hoffman and Amanda Young just don’t have the same motivation which makes the series less interesting.
Got you, sucka!!!
The traps of Saw V are also less inspired. John Kramer is supposed to have left the instructions for Hoffman and likewise, a means to test them. If the traps had been Hoffman’s creation, it would explain why they weren’t as interesting as Jigsaw’s traps in the previous entries, but instead, you just get the feeling that Saw is running out of tricks.
Saw V is one of the weaker entries in the series. The concept of having the primary lead of a series being dead is innovative, but it feels like that innovation is unused and unjustified which leads to a weaker movie. I admire Saw for continuing to advance the story, but the story isn’t all that interesting and starts to show some real chinks in the armor that once was a big moneymaker. Saw V is followed by Saw VI in 2009.
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