Saw III

Reviewed by Alicia Glass
November 6, 2006

Director: Darren Lynn Bousman Studio: Lions Gate MPAA: R Website: Click Here Review Rating: 8.5 out of 10

Screencap from Saw III .

The master of madness and mayhem, Jigsaw, returns in this third installation of the Saw series, accompanied by his apprentice Amanda, and a whole host of new victims, survival tests, and surprise twists.

If you're a fan of the Saw series as a whole, you will get quite a bite from this movie. If you haven't seen the first two though, well, Saw III doesn't work as a stand-alone. Seems to me that the movie folks tried really hard to incorporate ALL of the plots from Saw and Saw II into the third, and reorder the original plots while doing their best to keep the same feel. It really wasn't necessary to do that, as the series already has a huge fan base.

So we have John Cramer as Jigsaw, who's dying of cancer. We have his apprentice and adopted daughter, the former junkie, Amanda. We have the poor kidnapped doctor, Lynn Denlon, who's been ordered to keep Jigsaw alive long enough for the latest victim, Jeff, to complete his tests. And we have the usual brutal traps, gorey tests, and a lot of fake blood.

Most of the tests in this movie weren't quite so horrifying (in my opinion), as they were performed by the apprentice Amanda, who simply doesn't think quite the same way as Jigsaw. I saw his tests of humanity from the first two movies as being so horrifying because they were personalized, something specific for each victim, and the single shining star of hope he always left them made it worse if they failed. For Saw 3, there's a lot of simple brutality without any real lessons imparted, a real failure on Amanda's part. However, Amanda's shortcomings are actually the real plot of Saw 3, so that makes up for it.

The 3 rd installment of the Saw series is worth a look-see and theatre prices. Sure, it's horrifying and murderous. It's also insightful in ways that will shock you worse than all that fake blood and bone-breaking.