It’s finally here, the long awaited sequel: Saw X. Since it’s conception nearly 20 years ago (that’s right, next year is 2 decades since the start of the Saw franchise), die hard fans have been hooked and I am no exception. But, did Saw X live up to my hopes?
The Plot
Saw X is set between Saw and Saw II. As Saw goes, the plot was a simple one, with very little tangents. John Kramer (Tobin Bell) aka Jigsaw, is dying of cancer. When he sees that a man from his cancer group has recovered from stage four he jumps at the chance to have a miracle recovery. He travels to Mexico where Dr Cecilia Pederson (Synnøve Macody Lund) and her team are performing surgeries and administering medications. Believing he is now cured John takes a thank you gift to his young host, only to find she is not there. But what is there? Evidence! He has not been cured! It was a money-making ROUSE. So he does what he does best, with the assistance of Amanda (Shawnee Smith): sets up some elaborate traps to test the deceptive group’s wills to live. Will anyone survive?
My Review
It’s going to be hard to review this without bias, but I’ll give it a go. For a movie like this, designed primarily as torture porn, the plot doesn’t need to be perfect. There could, however, have been a lot more holes than there were. Yes, the actors looked older than they should have done, considering the timeline, and yes, I was questioning how Kramer sourced all the equipment he needed to design and build the various traps, but I didn’t care, as soon as the signature music kicked in, I was transported to the 00s and happy to be there.
Let’s talk traps. We didn’t get, as the most recent saw movies have given us, a “starter” trap. There was a glimpse of a potential trap, but nothing that exclusively existed outside of the main story. The traps themselves ranged from “I could totally do that” to “surely that would kill him” and all had a sort of “medical” twist to them. I liked that the traps seemed like ones Kramer would have designed near the start of his career, (lol, career), rather than more advanced. I think my favourite may have been a trap where you had to cut through your arms to disentangle them from bombs – high stakes, nice and bloody, but not unwinnable. In Saw X all the people are trapped in the same room, but with individual traps, sort of akin to Saw II, but they aren’t moving round. This wasn’t my favourite set up – it made it slightly stagnate, as it’s all in one space. Unlike Saw, which is primarily set in one room, there are no cut aways, no flashbacks and no detectives.
On this note, thank GOD there are no detectives. This was always the worst part of the saws and it was refreshing not to have them (though it did always make for some wonderful bad acting).
Tobin Bell and Shawnee Smith are back and they are, as ever, the driving force. The opening actually made Kramer a sympathetic character, which I think is an interesting way to go and I liked it – you sympathise with his situation and want desperately for him to recover. Smiths’ character, Amanda, too, is sympathetic at times – she empathises with another drug addict and this humanises her. The characters in the traps are, overall, pretty unlikeable, but not wholly, which gave it some dimension. The acting didn’t have the charm of the so-bad-it’s-good of yester-saws, but it also wasn’t so bad it was well, bad.
Saw X leaves it open for more. I’d be very surprised it there wasn’t a Saw XI or Saw X2. And I won’t be mad at it. Yes, it was largely made for Saw fans, but there’s enough of us out there to justify it.
The twist… well, I won’t ruin anything, but it was… okay. In fact, there’s sort of two. One was a “yeah saw that coming but it was cool how they revealed it” and then there’s a mid-credits sequence which was a YEY moment for us.
Overall, a solid sequel, for the fans. And where does it sit in my ranking? I’d day fifth place – it’s not as good as the final chapter, but it’s better than Jigsaw.
3.5 stars, if you’re into that.
That Horror Chick 