EITHER there’s been an explosion over at the Smucker’s strawberry jelly factory, or “Saw IV” has arrived. After two solid entries and an OK one, the franchise is getting long in the tooth: This one is “Saw It Be-IV.”
Though the Saw world is a rival for Itchy and Scratchyland’s title of the violentest place on Earth, the scariest attacks I’ve seen on-screen this fall remain the bloodcurdling ones perpetrated by the New England Patriots offense. So: Is Jigsaw really dead? Read no further if you don’t want to know the answer.
The films remain unusual for their complicated plotting (there is far more going on than the standard scream-and-stab) and for their unforgiving Old Testament morality. The best scene here, a flashback, shows the engineer/torturer Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) – Will Shortz meets Torquemada – putting a drug dealer in one of his trademark rusty-cogs-and-pointy-objects contraptions. To escape before the thing bleeds him out, the dealer must press onto a lot of knives. With his face. That way his future ugliness will match the ugliness of his soul, get it?
But we’ve seen a lot of that kind of thing in the first three go-rounds. The main story here is that of a detective named Rigg (Lyriq Bent), who follows a series of fiendish clues. Each clue leads to another trapped person about to get ripped apart like a nougaty Milky Way.
The moral element has gotten pretty fuzzy; Rigg’s only character flaw is that he’s “obsessed” with saving victims. Jigsaw and his accomplice Amanda are indeed dead – the opening scene is a rather sticky autopsy (his skull gets taken apart). But yet another of his cassette tapes is hidden in his stomach, and the games begin again. Since we don’t know how many tapes and torture machines Jigsaw made before he departed this world, the franchise could go on this way forever, which is a copout. But just to jolly things along, another accomplice is produced.
That development isn’t very interesting, though, and here’s the main flaw with the series: It’s about appropriate punishment meant to highlight personal faults. But since the thing is increasingly impatient to jump forward to the next big torture set piece, there isn’t any time to establish anyone’s character. Butcher shops are bloody, too, but they’re not scary.
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SAW IV
Not the sharpest tool in the shed.
Running time: 97 minutes. Rated R (extreme graphic violence and torture, profanity). At the 34th Street, the Orpheum, the 84th Street, others.