SAW WEEK: Saw - The Final Chapter (2010)

The ironically named Saw; The Final Chapter (there are already further movies and possibly more, I guess) was full of surprises.

The biggest being that I came away from this gory offering with great admiration for the tight plotting of the whole franchise to date.

This episode had ties to numerous events - but possibly not explained - in previous chapters, and I like to think was all planned from a very early stage.

Of course, this also further compounds the feeling I mentioned the other day that the on-going saga - which is seven parts of a single story - as much like a blood-spattered  HBO series as a horror movie franchise.

While occasionally looking like a cheap '80s cop show, and sometimes hampered by some hilarious overacting from key players in the story, Saw: The Final Chapter (aka Saw 3D aka Saw VII) manages to cram so much into the first hour that you think the credits are about to roll, and then a whole new development unfolds.

The film also brought back Cary Elwes as Dr Gordon, from the original (and best) Saw flick, which I wasn't expecting 

The first big Jigsaw trap takes place in broad daylight in a storefront window, which seems too public for a classic Jigsaw trap and appears to serve only to later reintroduce the survivors as members of a support group.

The main trap-driven plotline of the movie, which was presumably all set up before John Kramer (Tobin Bell) died (he appears in a telling flashback scene), centres around testing Bobby Dagen (Sean Patrick Flanery, of Young Indiana Jones fame).

Bobby has made a name for himself on the self-help circuit (which is where he crosses paths for the blokes from the storefront trap) after publishing a book documenting his supposed survival in one of Jigaw's games. Only it's all bullshit.

So Jigsaw has Bobby kidnapped and then runs him through a series of tests, with the life of one of his friends and confidantes in the balance each time.

Let's just say Bobby isn't very good at these games.

Meanwhile, the police are closing in on Jigsaw's surviving accomplice, Mark Hoffman (Costas Manylor), who escaped the "reverse bear-trap" that Kramer's ex-wife Jill Tuck (Betsy Russell) put him in at the end of the last movie.

Hoffman is now on the hunt for Jill, who turns herself over to the authorities seeking protection and immunity.

I have to say, while it eventually all comes together very satisfactorily, I haven't been impressed for a while about how the franchise got hijacked by Hoffman's story.

As becomes increasingly clear in this chapter, he's just a deranged mass murdering serial killer, without the code of ethics (and superhuman engineering skills and limitless resources) of the more charismatic - but deceased - John Kramer.

I keep coming back to the conclusion, even though killing off the main villain and then continuing his deeds posthumously is a brilliant twist, that John Kramer's Jigsaw would have made an archetypal Batman villain... and I'd have loved to have seen a gritty crossover with the Christopher Nolan era Batman movies. 

While the planned sequel to Saw VII never got made, as box office interest in the franchise was waning, I'm looking forward to finding out how this all ties in to 2017's Jigsaw... and then Spiral: From The Book of Saw.