SAW WEEK: Saw V (2008)

The intricate - and convoluted - timeline of the Saw franchise continues to be simultaneously continued and further complicated with 2008's Saw V.

Picking up from the end of Saw IV (which is also the end of Saw III!), FBI agent Strahm (Scott Paterson) finds himself unceremoniously dumped from the Jigsaw investigation, even as he starts to realise that the cop being hailed as a hero, Mark Hoffman (Costas Mandylor) was actually Jigsaw's protégé all along.

Flashbacks help explain how Hoffman made such a dramatic switch from law officer to sidekick to a supervillain, even as we watch another of Jigsaw's games unfold (set in motion around the time of his death), featuring five people being forced through a succession of tests.

Barring the initial torture device shown in the film (and we later learn why), Saw V sees the various gruesome traps reverting to the true ethos of John Kramer, these are devices that - with an application of intelligence and a level head - a person is meant to escape from, even though they will possibly be injured in the process.

It's all about the learning process.

That said, there's definitely a steady increase in the gruesomeness of the traps (the whole 'hand-and-spinning blade' shtick, for instance), and a nasty sadism creeping into some of the lingering camera shots.

As with the previous entry in the series, parts of Saw V's story run in tandem with earlier films, filling in gaps and explaining elements we might not have picked up on previously (or made incorrect assumptions about).

While this is definitely more coherent than Saw IV, it's harder to feel the modicum of empathy for Hoffman that we might have felt for Kramer who - up until the whole 'creating killer traps' stage of his life - seems to have been an okay fellow. 

Increasingly, the interlocking plot elements and story strands give the franchise the feel of an ongoing television show, rather than a series of movies.

Not only does the timespan of the contemporary events across all the films so far feel very compact, but it also feels as though crucial 'clues' are being left out, simply so they can be addressed (or retrospectively backfilled) in a later film.

This transition to a serialised television formula also got me thinking about how I would use a villain akin to Jigsaw as an antagonist in a roleplaying game.

Initially, I would ensure that the player-characters were never the targets of the villain's traps, rather they would be the investigators coming upon the aftermath.

I guess I'd possibly consider having them burst into a room and finding a person trapped in one of the "Jigsaw" devices and try to save them from it, but, personally, I wouldn't put my players in a situation where a character of theirs could die (so graphically) in a trap, just because they couldn't figure it out.

To my mind, player-characters are supposed to be "heroes", rather than victims. Unfortunately, playing it straight by the Book of Saw, there aren't really any true heroes per se in these stories (not that survive more than a couple of films, anyway), which is why the story set-up needs to be tweaked with a bit.

Unless, of course, you're playing some version of Call of Cthulhu - or a similar hardcore horror game - where the player-characters are often considered expendable anyway.