Movie Review: Saw IV (2007)

Jigsaw is dead. We get definitive proof of that in the opening scene, putting any doubts as to whether or not the series was willing to kill off Tobin Bell to rest. Well, they were sort of willing to kill him off. I mean, he pops up in a bunch of flashbacks even in this movie.

So where does the story go from here? What characters can it follow? Detective Allison Kerry (Dina Meyer, Starship Troopers) has been with us since the original, but she was killed by Amanda in Saw III. Eric Matthews (Donnie Wahlberg) is still missing, presumably in captivity. I guess Tapp from the first Saw is dead? Not really sure. Adam from the first Saw is definitely dead. Amanda is now dead. The actor that played Dr. Gordon had sued the franchise, so it didn’t look like he’d be returning anytime soon. And we sure as hell don’t want Jeff as the protagonist again. Would it be following that woman from John Kramer’s dream at the end of Saw III? We don’t even know her name.

The writers of the Saw franchise basically wrote themselves into a corner where they needed to unveil the whole someone’s been helping Jigsaw the whole time twist as a way to keep the story going. So it’s no surprise that the twist to this movie is a rehash of Saw II’s twist. It’s just a shame that it’s a character that we barely knew — who had one brief scene in Saw III, and didn’t make too much of an impression in this movie even when he had screentime.

As for our protagonist, they probably did choose the guy that had the most collective screentime of characters that weren’t dead from the series in Rigg (Lyriq Bent). It’s just a shame that they didn’t spread his screentime out a bit more throughout the series, because like Hoffman (Costas Mandylor), he made barely an impression in Saw III, but at least had something to do in Saw II.

I said in my review for Saw III that Jigsaw’s morals never made any sense, so the less they focus on them the better. That’s never been more true than in this movie, in which Lieutenant Rigg has to battle his desire to save people. What does that have to do with appreciating life? And why am I saying Jigsaw if Jigsaw is dead?

Well…

The twist here is that it’s actually going on at the same time as Saw III. So technically Jigsaw and Amanda are alive for most of this movie’s runtime, but they’re just in that one room, with Jigsaw hooked up to a heart monitor.

It’s definitely a cheap cop out, and it doesn’t really accomplish a whole lot, other than I guess lend some new meaning to the tape that Hoffman listened to at the very beginning of the film.

This movie’s definitely a mess. It doesn’t do a whole lot to advance the story and is instead more concerned with showing the past. We meet Jill Tuck (Betsy Russell), the woman from Jigsaw’s dream, who is actually his ex-wife. We learn more about Jigsaw, of course, and the series gives him more motivation for his actions that seemed like it was already taken care of with his cancer diagnosis.

If there’s one thing I like about this movie it’s the main trap with Matthews. I mean the game itself is complete nonsense, but at least it’s fun visually, and leads to one of the most memorable deaths in the series, all while wrapping up Donnie Wahlberg’s story.

This movie is reasonably entertaining, but is so far from being good. The movie’s not really concerned with scaring its audiences, and instead aims to make its viewers cringe. in the opening scene, you have people pulling John Kramer’s brain out of his dead body and cutting open his stomach. I don’t know a lot about autopsies, sure, but would they do that? Like it makes sense that they’d at least look at his brain because there was clearly some attempt done at surgery there, but why the stomach? They find the tape he swallowed at the end of Saw III, but why did they even think to look there? Kramer’s got a deep gash in his throat; I think it’s safe to assume his stomach had nothing to do with his death.

This is really the Saw movie that doubles down on the series’s tendancy to tell incomprehensible and overly convoluted stories. In many ways, Saw III capped off a trilogy, and didn’t need to be expanded upon. But these movies made a ton of money and were made for very little, so why not continue?

Rating: 4/10