by Ice Cream Jonsey » Mon Mar 07, 2022 9:00 pm
Saw IV
This is a bizarre movie. I remember the first one quite well, numbers 2 and 3 less, but this was intentional because I wasn't going to watch 5 of these things in a week.
I hate to say it but the biggest drawback of this is the two FUCKING WHITE MALES!!!!! who are feuding, I guess, the non-descript cop and non-descript FBI agent. I did remember their "spooge on a salt-free saltine" dick swinging contest and years of maturity hasn't changed how uninteresting their performances are. Everyone else on the side of the "law" has more going on, especially the other cop that looks like Ken Griffey, Jr.
The best part of Saw IV is when Jigsaw, whose autopsy we see at the beginning, pulls strings even though he is dead of cancer. The worst part is trying to muster up any sort of sympathy at all for the cops, who give us very little reason to care about them. (The charisma-less cop has a daughter, I guess, but no wife and the story is "short" which, if you are trying to make us care about these guys at all so we're not just rooting for dead Jigsaw, it shouldn't be.)
There IS a thing of scenery that I am captivated by, and it is done to perfection in Se7en, which I watched on Sunday - the "terrible, yet unnamed American city."
There is one bit where an ex of Jigsaw is getting interrogated where the FBI says "turn off the air in there" and in a Fincher movie there would be an explicit reason for that, whereas in Saw IV there really isn't anything other than letting us know, for the 20 second scene that follows, that the FBI agent is trying to make uncomfortable an ex who....... almost immediately turns the tables? Later, as two potential victims of Jigsaw's are shown in a dungeons suffering, there are SIX computer monitors showing video feeds (of what we never know) and I don't know, you're making Saw IV, make the number "4" maybe show up everywhere. Or maybe not, who cares, but you get the sense that six was used because that's how big the desk was. And not everything has to be Fincher, but the choices in this movie don't seem deliberate.
Which is fine.
A lot of the movie is presented quite well! Ken Griffey Jr. (Officer Rigg) enters a crappy hotel and the wear and tear is just perfect. Haunted house guys, who I have hung around in my life, get urban decay. The owner of the hotel is morbidly obese and again, after Se7en I can say my weight loss goals are to "not appear on the radar of serial murderers."
We eventually see that Jigsaw was trying to get his ex-wife out of the drug addiction clinic and as someone who has asked someone that works at a hospital "how was your day" for over a decade, welllllllllllllll let's maybe not judge ole Jiggers there for doing a better job trying to encourage an exit strategy.
Jigsaw hints that Rigg's wife needs him (and she does, she is going through some personal issues) but Jigsaw uses the pleasures of puzzles and mysteries to waste Rigg's time. It was at the point where Rigg is trying to deal with some obese hotel-manager rapist (who films it) that I thought that Rigg SURE IS wasting a lot of time and Jigsaw is flat out telling him with pictures that his wife needs him.
In more flashbacks, we see what made Jigsaw Jigsaw - his wife was pregnant, but a junkie trying to get back into the clinic to, I guess, get some drugs they have laying around in there like the treasure chests in the city of Yew in Ultima 3 slams the door right into his (at the time, not ex-)wife's belly and that kills the baby. Jigsaw already doesn't have a great opinion of the crap that his wife is trying to save ("you can't help them, they have to help themselves") and then the scene switches to the very, very uncharismatic FBI agent trying to do a "recap" of what happened that is so egregiously patronizing that at this point all we want is to see the FBI agent end up in one of the Jigsaw traps.
In a very real way Saw IV is quaint because everyone Jigsaw hates are people that he perceives as weak, although don't get me wrong, he puts plenty of people he does not hate in traps, whereas this would all be based on personal politics now.
I am certain that so much of this film makes perfect sense in the mind of the writers. There is a beauty in that and there is very much a "text adventure" component to Saw IV, as we never see anyone drive anywhere, we go from room to room with puzzles
The way scenes transition is really awkward, I guess clever if you've never seen it, but so many scenes do it - the camera swings somewhere, or something obscures the camera of one scene and we are taken to another, like the other scene "should" be there and I don't think it works, I am not sure what the director was going for. It's sort of like a walk through a haunted house maybe, where scenes transition from room to room?
Our FBI agent is able to go from scene to scene to interrogation room to crime scene to hospital and again, never drives - it does give the movie a dream-like quality with all the jumping around. I don't know how you judge a movie that *has* a style, but it's just not a style you are into.
Tobin Bell is amazing, by faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar the best actor in this, and the parts with him on the screen are interesting - how did he get like this? We learn that his wife lost their baby, he was diagnosed with cancer and he got into a car accident around the same time. Of course he cracked, the Joker cracked for less, the Beltway Snipers cracked for less.
There is an interesting "twist" with timelines at the end of Saw IV, and my understanding is that all will be revealed in the last two movies. So I don't know - yes, if you think these things are a waste of time there is nothing in this to convince anyone otherwise, but with a few more characters to care about they weren't that far off from being watchable.
Saw IV
This is a bizarre movie. I remember the first one quite well, numbers 2 and 3 less, but this was intentional because I wasn't going to watch 5 of these things in a week.
I hate to say it but the biggest drawback of this is the two FUCKING WHITE MALES!!!!! who are feuding, I guess, the non-descript cop and non-descript FBI agent. I did remember their "spooge on a salt-free saltine" dick swinging contest and years of maturity hasn't changed how uninteresting their performances are. Everyone else on the side of the "law" has more going on, especially the other cop that looks like Ken Griffey, Jr.
The best part of Saw IV is when Jigsaw, whose autopsy we see at the beginning, pulls strings even though he is dead of cancer. The worst part is trying to muster up any sort of sympathy at all for the cops, who give us very little reason to care about them. (The charisma-less cop has a daughter, I guess, but no wife and the story is "short" which, if you are trying to make us care about these guys at all so we're not just rooting for dead Jigsaw, it shouldn't be.)
There IS a thing of scenery that I am captivated by, and it is done to perfection in Se7en, which I watched on Sunday - the "terrible, yet unnamed American city."
There is one bit where an ex of Jigsaw is getting interrogated where the FBI says "turn off the air in there" and in a Fincher movie there would be an explicit reason for that, whereas in Saw IV there really isn't anything other than letting us know, for the 20 second scene that follows, that the FBI agent is trying to make uncomfortable an ex who....... almost immediately turns the tables? Later, as two potential victims of Jigsaw's are shown in a dungeons suffering, there are SIX computer monitors showing video feeds (of what we never know) and I don't know, you're making Saw IV, make the number "4" maybe show up everywhere. Or maybe not, who cares, but you get the sense that six was used because that's how big the desk was. And not everything has to be Fincher, but the choices in this movie don't seem deliberate.
Which is fine.
A lot of the movie is presented quite well! Ken Griffey Jr. (Officer Rigg) enters a crappy hotel and the wear and tear is just perfect. Haunted house guys, who I have hung around in my life, get urban decay. The owner of the hotel is morbidly obese and again, after Se7en I can say my weight loss goals are to "not appear on the radar of serial murderers."
We eventually see that Jigsaw was trying to get his ex-wife out of the drug addiction clinic and as someone who has asked someone that works at a hospital "how was your day" for over a decade, welllllllllllllll let's maybe not judge ole Jiggers there for doing a better job trying to encourage an exit strategy.
Jigsaw hints that Rigg's wife needs him (and she does, she is going through some personal issues) but Jigsaw uses the pleasures of puzzles and mysteries to waste Rigg's time. It was at the point where Rigg is trying to deal with some obese hotel-manager rapist (who films it) that I thought that Rigg SURE IS wasting a lot of time and Jigsaw is flat out telling him with pictures that his wife needs him.
In more flashbacks, we see what made Jigsaw Jigsaw - his wife was pregnant, but a junkie trying to get back into the clinic to, I guess, get some drugs they have laying around in there like the treasure chests in the city of Yew in Ultima 3 slams the door right into his (at the time, not ex-)wife's belly and that kills the baby. Jigsaw already doesn't have a great opinion of the crap that his wife is trying to save ("you can't help them, they have to help themselves") and then the scene switches to the very, very uncharismatic FBI agent trying to do a "recap" of what happened that is so egregiously patronizing that at this point all we want is to see the FBI agent end up in one of the Jigsaw traps.
In a very real way Saw IV is quaint because everyone Jigsaw hates are people that he perceives as weak, although don't get me wrong, he puts plenty of people he does not hate in traps, whereas this would all be based on personal politics now.
I am certain that so much of this film makes perfect sense in the mind of the writers. There is a beauty in that and there is very much a "text adventure" component to Saw IV, as we never see anyone drive anywhere, we go from room to room with puzzles
The way scenes transition is really awkward, I guess clever if you've never seen it, but so many scenes do it - the camera swings somewhere, or something obscures the camera of one scene and we are taken to another, like the other scene "should" be there and I don't think it works, I am not sure what the director was going for. It's sort of like a walk through a haunted house maybe, where scenes transition from room to room?
Our FBI agent is able to go from scene to scene to interrogation room to crime scene to hospital and again, never drives - it does give the movie a dream-like quality with all the jumping around. I don't know how you judge a movie that *has* a style, but it's just not a style you are into.
Tobin Bell is amazing, by faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar the best actor in this, and the parts with him on the screen are interesting - how did he get like this? We learn that his wife lost their baby, he was diagnosed with cancer and he got into a car accident around the same time. Of course he cracked, the Joker cracked for less, the Beltway Snipers cracked for less.
There is an interesting "twist" with timelines at the end of Saw IV, and my understanding is that all will be revealed in the last two movies. So I don't know - yes, if you think these things are a waste of time there is nothing in this to convince anyone otherwise, but with a few more characters to care about they weren't that far off from being watchable.