Movie Review: Saw III (2006)

Saw III spends a lot of time explaining how the twist at the end of Saw II works, and how it affected the events of the first film.

It attempts to tell an emotional story, but it doesn’t quite pull it off. The main story is amongst the villains, and as a result, the story of the victims isn’t particularly interesting.

I do appreciate the attention to detail in the flashbacks to previous films, but at the same time, it leads to the story being incredibly convoluted. And it gets worse after this movie, of course. It’s an interesting means of storytelling, to go more backwards than forwards, but that doesn’t really work unless the setup to the first movie is like the most interesting thing ever, and it’s not really. But whatever.

This movie definitely ups the coincidences from the first couple movies, making it seem like Jigsaw/John Kramer (Tobin Bell) is omniscient.

I also find it weird that Jigsaw is willing to lecture Amanda (Shawnee Smith) on how killing is wrong, given that the trap that Amanda was in in the first movie required Amanda to either kill someon in order to escape, or to die herself. Jigsaw’s morals have never made sense, so the less the films focus on them, the better.

Rating: 4/10