The Saw series started out as a fever dream project for film students James
Wan and Leigh Whannell but has since developed into a whole franchise of gore.
The central villain Jigsaw initially presented himself as a non-serial killer who just wanted
to force troubled people into appreciating and fighting for their lives. But as the series went
on, his games eventually made it clear that he and his minions just wanted to see people suffer.
As a result, some installments definitely turned out better than others.
From worst to best, here's a ranking of all the Saw movies so far.
"Let the game begin."
By the time the seventh piece of the Jigsaw puzzle came into play, this series looked almost nothing
like the original. In the pic, Detective Hoffman was so busy running around cleaning up his own
messes that the day's games seemed like an afterthought meant only to follow formula.
In fact, there were two major group traps that were completely devoid of
value to the overarching plot. Whoever thought it was necessary to have a man
rip all the skin of his back off in 3D might just be sicker than Jigsaw.
There were a couple of elements of redemption—like Dr. Gordon
making a long-overdue comeback to the series to tie up a few loose limbs.
And there was a kernel of something interesting in play with the fake Jigsaw survivor at the center.
But the movie was frustratingly disjointed, and Hoffman's Terminator-style raid on the
police department laid waste to the entire framework of Jigsaw's "legacy."
The eighth installment-slash-revival of the Saw franchise had to start fresh after The
Final Chapter said "game over" to most of the series' overarching plot points.
Instead of bringing back Dr. Gordon or another known name to carry out his
bidding, the movie introduced a new survivor-turned-killer to the fold.
By jumping back 10 years to play out one of Jigsaw's old and largely unknown group traps,
we're introduced to Logan Nelson, a mortician who's sneakily investigating the cadavers
of his own victims while copycatting John Kramer's work to deliver justice
to several dangerous criminals and the police officer who helped set them free.
Of course, none of this is apparent throughout the whole movie, as tricky editing and clever cutaways
guard the secret of Logan's true identity until the very end, after he finally ensnares his mark.
Everything that's happening to Jigsaw's victims seems to be in real time,
making the third act a whirlwind of explanations and montage moments.
It's a suitable sequel and certainly carries forward the atmosphere and carnage Saw fans have
come to know. But it also barely offers anything new and leaves some very loose threads dangling.
The third installment of the Saw series was one of the most problematic for several reasons.
For starters, the victims were completely sympathetic and even less deserving of their
fates than anyone else. Submitting the father and mother of a drunk driving victim to torture trials
just because they're not grieving the way you might want them to? That's cruel, even for Jigsaw.
Even worse was the fact that the new traps for this installment were unnecessarily gruesome,
to the point of being unwatchable at times.
And let's not forget about the table saw brain surgery we just had to watch unfold.
Sure, it was a clever turn of fortune that the person who was really being
tested was protege number one, Amanda. But the choice of victims here seemed to exhaust the
whole generous Grim Reaper identity Jigsaw crafted for himself in the previous pics,
making Saw III among the series' slackest chapters.
Whereas Saw V managed to make Detective Hoffman interesting, Saw VI did not.
Since he'd already killed off Strahm, and the spate of drug
addicts and other officers who'd run afoul of Jigsaw were dead as well,
Hoffman's victims list became pretty arbitrary and ridiculous.
"Do you like how brutality feels, Mark?"
This time, he picked on a pair of predatory loan sharks and one particularly nasty insurance
adjuster who'd denied John Kramer coverage for some experimental cancer treatments. Bearing
in mind the fact that this movie was released in the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis,
it's understandable why the filmmakers might try to get political and punish greedy people.
However, the plot was still flimsy and underexplored,
and seemed extra gruesome just for the sake of shock value. Combined with some
terrible acting and forced twists, it became stock shlock long before the timer ran out.
The redeeming factor of the movie that keeps it from landing last on this list
is that Hoffman's voyeuristic copycat game in the beginning
was a pretty decent metaphor for the Saw series as a whole.
For the fourth installment, director Darren Lynn Bousman decided to delve into John Kramer's
wretched rationale by bringing in his tragic history with his wife into the picture, along with
another secondary psycho to fill in the timeline gaps as John Kramer took his leave of the world.
But the central player of the games, Lieutenant Rigg, was wholly undeserving of his trial.
So what if he was passionate about his job and missed out on a family vacation or two?
The punishment never really matched the crime in this series, but especially so for Rigg.
That said, the clever culmination of events at the end was a fresh surprise that saved this story.
The fact that Jigsaw was still in control of his crew, even while lying cold on the autopsy table,
was delightfully bonkers and managed to renew any fading interest in what was next.
By the time we got to the fifth film,
it was Detective Hoffman who'd taken over Jigsaw's kill crew.
He was sloppy enough to attract some heat from on high in the form of FBI special agent Strahm.
Strahm was obsessively committed to the cause of nailing his prime suspect,
even after escaping his own death trap by way of an ink pen tracheotomy. So,
the game of cat and mouse that ensued between them was pretty epic.
Meanwhile, the games that were afoot in Saw V were also a bit
more precise and interesting. The victims of this round weren't just
helplessly being ripped to shreds but instead at least pretended to use their
brains before engaging those mechanisms that would cause their eventual demise.
The gore of the games was also mercifully dialed down a notch,
which gave more room for the sound effects team to fill in the blanks,
rather than always leaning on graphic visuals to get the job done.
This film's return to a teamwork element in the games was refreshing,
and the passionate pursuit of Strahm culminated in a crushing
twist ending that was as jaw-dropping as anything that came before it or after.
"Spiral: From the Book of Saw" strips the "Saw" franchise down to its basics. No more
Jigsaw. No more twisted, convoluted continuity. It's just traps, a serial killer, some pig masks,
and a mystery — one that, in this case, may be a little too easy to solve.
"Jigsaw copycat. That could be difficult."
As a way of breathing new life into the franchise, "Spiral" is a huge success.
In terms of filmmaking, this is the slickest "Saw" yet, and while its
style isn't as aggressively edgy as the first movie's, its cast is bursting with star power.
In addition, focusing on Chris Rock's scrappy detective Zeke Banks instead
of the killer and their victims offers a new perspective on the ever-brutal "Saw"
universe. The traps are much simpler than the Rube Goldberg-esque devices from the later
"Saw" films, but they're still suitably uncomfortable, if somewhat less graphic.
The problem? "Spiral" isn't all that scary. By emphasizing the police investigation over
everything else, "Spiral" plays more like a police procedural or a crime thriller.
Sure, it's tense, and the trap scenes are still full of bloody "Saw" charm,
but outside of a few jump scares you'd be hard-pressed to call "Spiral" a real horror flick.
As a plain old movie, "Spiral" is likely the best, and most accessible, installment
since the first one. Is it really a superior "Saw" experience, though? To diehard fans, probably not.
Director Darren Lynn Bousman managed to avoid the sophomore slump with the first sequel to
Saw. In fact, the film gamely expanded the world that'd been established in the
original and offered a new vein of intrigue for the subsequent sequels to float on.
The backbone of a selected group of victims, stuck in a dirty doom house where they're racing against
the clock to flesh out their own shared histories was still there. But the movie managed to layer
that element with a compelling subplot about Jigsaw's arresting officer, Detective Matthews,
and his missing son. And on top of that, there was the surprise return of Amanda, which answered
the question of what would actually happen to those few who managed to survive Jigsaw's games.
Unlike some of the other sequels, the entire plot was pretty polished and managed to give
the series some staying power, so movie two is the second-best of the series.
There was something very artful about Saw's approach to the macabre that made the movie
such an indelible experience. The puzzle pieces of skin taken from victims' bodies
were meant to be symbols of what was missing from people's lives, but they were also a
collective metaphor for the audience's job of digesting everything that happened in the film.
The small-scale setting of two and a half people locked in a bathroom
playing a game of Clue for their lives was surprisingly effective.
And so were the whirly-cam montage tricks used to show off other terror traps.
So, Saw opened the door to much more interest in exploring the sick, sad world of Jigsaw,
especially after it ended on such a twist that it was decidedly not "game over."
The movie was still far from perfect, of course. The film had some moments of
lazy acting and low-budget camera angling that are pretty cringeworthy upon review.
But even if it didn't boast the slickest cinematography known to Hollywood,
Saw was still an original and very disturbing abstraction for the auteurs to explore and
was executed with impressive efficiency and invention. For those reasons, it's still the best.
"Game over."
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