Prompted by a brief discussion on “crap” on Pivotal-film — Ashes of Time Redux and My Blueberry Nights were inexplicably mentioned, though the latter is certainly Wong’s weakest film to date — I hereby submit Saw IV for consideration, as it’s truly worthy of the word.
Oh, the curse of obsessive seriality, a fatal compulsion that I’ve brought upon myself. The first installment of the series at least had an intricate puzzle at its core, its tension attenuated in later films by the audience’s knowledge and by the fact that the main antagonist, played by Tobin Bell, was, well, already very dead. (The first Saw also benefited from the deliciously awful anticipation of a smarmy Cary Elwes about to do some major surgery on his limbs, as well as the presence of Michael Emerson, who totally nailed Creepy well before his current star turn as Benjamin Linus on “Lost”.) Saw IV, however, is an uninteresting mess, with inefficient directing, throwaway exposition, and limp acting all around. The dead Jigsaw is far more alive than the rest of the actors here.
At least one can argue that Saw IV drops any pretense about what the audience is there for. It’s all about the traps, whose David-Fincher-meets-Rube-Goldberg ingenuity have become less interesting in each iteration. The highlight: two men — one with eyes sewn shut, the other his mouth — dragged closer to each other by chains into a toothy meat-grinding machine, but that happens in the first few minutes. It’s perhaps interesting to note that the big revelation at the end isn’t a Scooby-Doo style unmasking, but all about temporal trickery — clever, but it requires too much exacting attention to the details of Saw III. Many viewers would have tuned out well before that.
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