Movie Review: Saw 3D (2010)

Patrick J Mullen
Sep 9, 2018 · 5 min read

In what was planned to be the last movie of the Saw series, the filmmakers made a true love letter to their fans. This movie is not great. It’s not even good, really. But it perfectly understands what its fans want to see. Hell, the movie was even released in 3D.

The movie starts to reveal Dr. Lawrence Gordon’s (Cary Elwes) fate from the end of the first Saw movie, which the filmmakers have said was always the number one question people seemed to have for them. He crawled away and cauterized his leg with a hot steam pipe.

This had been alluded to before to the attentive viewer, when Saw V showed Strahm noticing a trail of blood outside the bathroom.

I like the main trap/game plot in this movie. It follows Bobby Dagen (Sean Patrick Flanery), who is on a book tour for his new book about how surviving a Jigsaw trap changed his life. He’s also shooting a promotional DVD. Anyways, you might assume he’s lying about it, since we’ve never seen him before, and he is. But the people around him don’t know that. In a fun scene, he goes to a victims of Jigsaw support group and we see cameos from a lot of the trap survivors of previous films. Even Dr. Gordon shows up, acting creepy as hell.

Bobby eventually gets captured, though, and he gets lectured by Billy the Puppet on how he knows he’s never been tested like this, but now he’ll have to prove himself. Unfortunately, he has to save his wife, Joyce (Gina Holden), who never even knew that he was lying about all that. She’s completely innocent. And she’s not the only one he has to try and save. There’s also his publicist and lawyer, but at least I guess they knows he’s lying. I mean, they’re still victims, but I guess by Jigsaw logic, they deserve it. There’s no Jigsaw logic that explains Joyce potentially being a victim, and it’s unfortunate and unsettling.

Meanwhile, Jill Tuck (Betsy Russell), aware that Hoffman made it out of her trap alive, goes to Matt Gibson (Chad Donella) of internal affairs, to ask for immunity. She says she’ll tell him everything about Hoffman if he protects her.

He can’t protect her from a stupid dream sequence, though, where Hoffman kills her by ramming some kind of motorized car thing through her torso.

It’s really cheap stuff to have a dream sequence in here, and I can’t shake the fact that this movie is weirdly hateful to women. All the Saw movies have people getting tortured, sure, but this movie seems to take some kind of perverted pleasure in seeing women being particularly helpless.

I mean, the first trap we see ends up pitting two men against their girlfriend because she’s manipulative.

Anyways, Hoffman is out to get Jill, and not much else. There’s a trap plot going on, sure, but it’s never clear the motivation.

We get our obligatory flashbacks of course, but not really for the same reasons as the other movies. There’s one flashback which shows John Kramer (Tobin Bell) getting a copy of Bobby’s book signed by the author, whom he quietly accuses of lying of course.

Hoffman sends a video to Gibson demanding he give him Jill, or else the game will continue. There’s also some pretty lame stuff to make Gibson and Hoffman connected through their past. Maybe the reason it doesn’t work is because Gibson is a new character. Hoffman killed everyone we knew in the last movie, so the series had to create entirely new characters. That was one of the strengths of the previous movies — how a character could be set up very briefly in one, and then appear with much more significance in a future entry. It made things seem really intricately planned and thought out, even if that wasn’t the case.

The Gibson stuff ends pretty unceremoniously in what turns out to really just be petty revenge for something that predated Hoffman’s tenure as a Jigsaw apprentice. He eventually gets to Jill, as well, taking out like the entirety of the police department once again. And when he finally gets his revenge through the reverse bear trap, I’m left wondering who was I supposed to be rooting for? Hoffman is obviously a very brutal killer; we know that. But Jill was also along with John from basically the beginning, and she is indeed complicit.

Anyways, Bobby fails, and can’t save his wife.

And Hoffman burns down a bunch of evidence and then gets assaulted by Dr. Gordon wearing a pig mask. We then get a flashback revealing that Dr. Gordon was Jigsaw’s “greatest asset,” assisting in every trap that required some kind of surgery. He also recruited the doctor from Saw III, and wrote the note for Hoffman that he assumed was from Strahm. Jigsaw had tasked Gordon with protecting Jill once John Kramer died. And since he failed, he takes Hoffman to the bathroom from the original saw, and takes away the saw to prevent him from escaping.

I was very entertained by this movie, but it’s definitely not good. It’s amazing to see them rely once again on the somebody-else-was-helping-the-whole-time twist, and it’s gotten to a point of absurdity. But that’s also kind of why I like it.

Rating: 4/10

As Vast as Space and as Timeless as Infinity

This blog will be dedicated primarily to horror and sci-fi media, chiefly film and television.

Patrick J Mullen

Written by

As Vast as Space and as Timeless as Infinity

This blog will be dedicated primarily to horror and sci-fi media, chiefly film and television.

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