I had a rough couple of weeks for various reasons but most notably being sick, and I just barely watched anything other than YouTube videos and some episodes of old TV series I’m working on that maybe might get posts on this blog later on, but today I’m finally feeling a decent bit better though not entirely over my cold and in good spirits so decided it was time to take on Saw III.
As always, let’s get the nasty bad part of the review out of the way first. The entire storyline of the Jeff character is pretty uninteresting as they didn’t learn the lessons of the first film that having significant interactions between multiple instead of an angry guy just standing there contemplating not killing people like a total prick is a significant part of developing them. Also, the traps really lost their ironic basis entirely and none of them until the last one are particularly clever or interesting, they just sound like they were lazily picked out of a hat submitted by production staff. Likewise, a lot of gore was lost in this film I guess because of the surgery scene which absolutely could be an asset to some people but is not for me. Finally, this is where the series really started realizing the premise and the few lore-vital people were all the somewhat known name SAG actors they needed and started recruiting from cheaper international unions while shooting in Canada, which isn’t to demean the acting quality of any other country but it showed how much less focus they put on real character development in this film beyond the core baddies and nobody really shines here.
More importantly, there’s a fair amount that I liked about this film. Any extra time we get to spend with Tobin Sprout is always great, even if he’s just laying in a hospital bed and often barely conscious. Shawnee Smith really proved to be the MVP other than Tobin of the early films, in three different films she was given increased screen time and asked to basically play a totally different version of the character and she really pulls it off convincingly, here mixing a preening and scenery chewing villain with the emotional turmoil she often showed in the earlier two films. And the lack of real development of any other character is made up for a bit in the now signature flashback portions of the film where, sometimes donning a very unconvincing short wig, she really has her backstory of how she got this point as an acolyte fleshed out.
I criticized Darren Lynn Bousman’s direction in the second film as comparatively very flat and bland versus the original, and I imagine others did at the time too cause he steps up his game a bit here, picking some interesting shot framing from time to time and doing a hell of a lot more with lighting schemes. He still isn’t a James Wan, but the film rarely looks bad and starts developing more of a style that isn’t just trying to paint by numbers the meld of shaky grit and music video editing of the original which are still very much in play here but just a bit less than the last.
The medical plot that is the main driving force of the film is a unique angle none of the other films had, basically shedding the detective angle that made up half of the first two films in favor of a doctor whose life is tied to Jigsaw’s. I can’t say it is always like the most exciting, but it is a totally different angle that I found fairly engaging and it all ties together pretty well at the end which I will not spoil. In doing these series watch projects last year with Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street, I often found myself unexpectedly really enjoying some sequels purely because they operated a bit out of the box if not always successfully.
It wasn’t a perfect film and probably I like it less than than the first two, but it still brings value to the table as a sequel willing to fuck around with the formula a little bit. I did not regret this rewatch.
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