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Jigsaw and
Amanda are dead, but that doesn't mean that
Jigsaw's work is done. In fact, the games have just
begun. A police officer has to decide over life and
death as he's given the choice whether to let people
solve their own traps that have been set up for them
or to help them. But what would you do if you were
given the option to punish a rapist?
Every decade has at least one horror flick that spawns
several successful sequels and even more cheap clones.
In the 70s we had Halloween which led to Friday The
13th in the 80s. Then we had a big break until the
mid 90's when Scream was released and I think it's
safe to say that Saw is this decade's main horror
flick. Unfortunately, like all horror franchises, the
quality of the sequels isn't consistent and Saw 4 might
just be, in my opinion, the worst Saw flick so far
(even though Saw 2 was an unoriginal rip-off). Many
of you will and have all ready disagreed with me on
this and think that the Saw films are getting better
every year, but as a reviewer I have a tendency to
concentrate on the negatives rather than the positives.
Unfortunately I might add.
Saw 4 doesn't have much of a story and just like the
third movie, it has one guy facing several difficult
decisions. In fact, Saw 4 feels very much like Saw 3
and it almost seemed as if it was just a passage to
the fifth movie. Lions Gate really shot themselves in
the foot when they killed off Jigsaw and instead of
replacing the villain, they've come up with a very
simple solution to the problem. Unfortunately, this
simple solution is ridiculously complicated, more so
than it should have been. See Saw 4 is basically 50%
movie, 10% flashbacks from previous movies and 40%
flashbacks with new material of Jigsaw's life. This
made the movie very confusing. This also led to the
movie having way too many characters and instead of
focusing on one or two characters, they've decided to
focus on five or six characters.
This would have been fine if the movie hadn't moved at
such an extreme pace. Seriously, this sucker is in
fifth gear through and through and seems to be aching
for a sixth gear to be invented. This makes the movie
feel scrambled and messy (in all the wrong ways) and
it's definitely hard to follow the story. It was
probably very easy to write the script for this
movie though as it goes exactly where you expect it
to go. The end twist is predictable and the torture
scenes are getting old. We've all ready seen enough
of Jigsaw's life before he started performing his
experiments and the flashbacks didn't really add
anything to the plot. It simply seemed as if they
didn't really care anymore. They knew that the title
alone would bring people into the theatres.
Some of you may love this movie but it was just way
too busy for my taste, there was too much going on
all the time and therefore I had a hard time enjoying
the plot. Perhaps that was the entire point though
since there's barely any plot to be found in here.
Like I said in my review for Saw 3, this franchise
died with Saw 3 in my eyes and this was just an
unnecessary extension that we could have done without.
Don't worry though, I will be checking out Saw 8 and
Saw 14 as well because as long as Halloween exists
and people have money, the Saw franchise will probably
keep going strong, but in my eyes, the Saw franchise
ended with Saw 3.
We get lots of blood splatter, skin peeled off, guts,
intestines, impalements, well, you know what to expect
from the Saw franchise so I'm just going to leave it
at that. Good stuff but it's getting old.
It's no secret that I love the simplicity of the Saw
theme melody but again, it's getting old, maybe they
should change it up a bit.
Saw 4 was just as mediocre as I had expected it to be.
It's confusing, it's too complicated for its own good
and with Jigsaw dead, there's not a whole lot to keep
me interested in it anymore. Saw 4 feels more like a
Hostel sequel than a Saw sequel, all of the mystery
and riddles have been replaced with over-the-top
torture scenes and that's just not okay with me. This
should have been a DTV sequel if you ask me. It's a
decent movie but possibly the worst of the Saw films.
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