Saw IV
Year: 2007
Directed by: Darren Lynn Bousman
Starring: Tobin Bell, Lyriq Bent, Costas Mandylor, Scott Patterson, Athena Karkanis & Donnie Wahlberg
Runtime: 92 mins
BBFC: 18
Published: 22/10/21
Directed by: Darren Lynn Bousman
Starring: Tobin Bell, Lyriq Bent, Costas Mandylor, Scott Patterson, Athena Karkanis & Donnie Wahlberg
Runtime: 92 mins
BBFC: 18
Published: 22/10/21
I’m not really sure where to begin with Saw IV. After signing on to assist with Saw II & III, series creators James Wan & Leigh Whannell had finally departed the series to work on other projects (most notably Insidious & The Conjuring). But Lionsgate weren’t prepared to let the series go considering how profitable it was, and as such the mantle passed onto new writers Patrick Melton, Marcus Dunstan, and Thomas Fenton. But Darren Lynn Bousman had decided to stick around to direct one last film (famous last words) to help with the transition to a new team. So Saw IV is very much a transitionary film from what can easily be seen as ‘old Saw’ with the first three films, and ‘new Saw’ which encapsulates Saw IV to Saw VII. But much like a driver that doesn’t know how to handle manual transmission, shifting gears from one team to the other evidently wasn’t as smooth as one would hope.
I’m going to come right out and spoil the story for Saw IV so if you actually care about spoilers for this film then I suggest watching it first (or maybe do yourself a favour and don’t) because it’s kind of hard to talk about the story without either being misleading or giving the entire thing away.
Lieutenant Rigg (Lyriq Bent) and Detective Mark Hoffman (Costas Mandylor) discover the body of Detective Kerry who died in an unwinnable Jigsaw style game set up by Amanda Young in Saw III. Hoffman believes Young to be the Jigsaw copycat whose unwinnable games are being discovered, however FBI Agents Peter Strahm (Scott Patterson) and Lindsay Perez (Athena Karkanis) do not feel like she would be capable of performing such feats alone, nor with the aid of the dying John ‘Jigsaw’ Kramer (Tobin Bell).
Distraught, Rigg returns home only to wake up in a Jigsaw game especially for him. Rigg has ninety minutes to save Eric Matthews (Donnie Wahlberg) and Detective Hoffman, and to do so he must see, feel, and save people as Jigsaw does. Rigg must aid survivors, set-up traps, and dish out Jigsaw’s personal brand of justice by following specific instructions laid out for him.
Meanwhile Strahm and Perez interrogate Kramer’s ex-wife Jill Tuck (Betsy Russell) to gain more information about John’s past in the hope that it may help them track down Rigg before more bodies are added to Jigsaw’s ever-increasing count.
I’m going to come right out and spoil the story for Saw IV so if you actually care about spoilers for this film then I suggest watching it first (or maybe do yourself a favour and don’t) because it’s kind of hard to talk about the story without either being misleading or giving the entire thing away.
Lieutenant Rigg (Lyriq Bent) and Detective Mark Hoffman (Costas Mandylor) discover the body of Detective Kerry who died in an unwinnable Jigsaw style game set up by Amanda Young in Saw III. Hoffman believes Young to be the Jigsaw copycat whose unwinnable games are being discovered, however FBI Agents Peter Strahm (Scott Patterson) and Lindsay Perez (Athena Karkanis) do not feel like she would be capable of performing such feats alone, nor with the aid of the dying John ‘Jigsaw’ Kramer (Tobin Bell).
Distraught, Rigg returns home only to wake up in a Jigsaw game especially for him. Rigg has ninety minutes to save Eric Matthews (Donnie Wahlberg) and Detective Hoffman, and to do so he must see, feel, and save people as Jigsaw does. Rigg must aid survivors, set-up traps, and dish out Jigsaw’s personal brand of justice by following specific instructions laid out for him.
Meanwhile Strahm and Perez interrogate Kramer’s ex-wife Jill Tuck (Betsy Russell) to gain more information about John’s past in the hope that it may help them track down Rigg before more bodies are added to Jigsaw’s ever-increasing count.
The synopsis of that film was really difficult to write up because the story is just so scattershot and hard to follow in Saw IV. It’s the first real instance of a Saw film that feels as though the plot has been created after the traps were and serve only to carry you between those moments.
I have seen Saw IV around ten times now, difficult to believe I know considering how bad the film is, but obviously I watch it each time I re-watch the series. But even after all this time I struggle to really follow what’s happening in the story. It’s so fast paced and frenetically edited together in the same way that the trap scenes are from the first three films that what’s going on can often be damn near impossible to keep track of.
Even knowing the twist ending of Saw IV, that it’s all happening at the same time as Saw III and not actually after it which the opening leads you to believe, I find it difficult to keep that in mind because the writers are playing so fast and loose with timelines and established continuity that they may as well have thrown out all the existing story and started again.
I can see what Melton, Dunstan, and Fenton were going for with Saw IV as it spends a lot of time going back into the history of John, before the cancer diagnosis and really look as where the seeds of his philosophy were planted. But the problem is that Saw II and III already went back and looked at how John became Jigsaw, and it did it a whole lot better. In the previous two films we’re made to believe that John was a normal guy who had his world turned upside down with a terminal cancer diagnosis, and that after failing an attempt at suicide decided that if his body had the will to live then he would test other peoples will to live, people who had done bad things and, in his eyes, didn’t deserve to live whilst he died.
But Saw IV establishes that John was actually always an asshole with a God complex. He controls minute details about his wife’s life and work, he feels the need to preach to everyone about how much morally superior he is to them, and all it ends up doing is causing his wife to lose their baby and her to divorce him, just before he gets the cancer diagnosis. This removes any relatability that John had as Jigsaw. Whilst his philosophy was flawed and his methods were excessively violent, it’s certainly easy to see things from his point of view in the first two sequels. But Saw IV now makes us realise that John was never a nice guy and this probably would have happened regardless of his cancer diagnosis, that he was just a bomb waiting to go off.
I have seen Saw IV around ten times now, difficult to believe I know considering how bad the film is, but obviously I watch it each time I re-watch the series. But even after all this time I struggle to really follow what’s happening in the story. It’s so fast paced and frenetically edited together in the same way that the trap scenes are from the first three films that what’s going on can often be damn near impossible to keep track of.
Even knowing the twist ending of Saw IV, that it’s all happening at the same time as Saw III and not actually after it which the opening leads you to believe, I find it difficult to keep that in mind because the writers are playing so fast and loose with timelines and established continuity that they may as well have thrown out all the existing story and started again.
I can see what Melton, Dunstan, and Fenton were going for with Saw IV as it spends a lot of time going back into the history of John, before the cancer diagnosis and really look as where the seeds of his philosophy were planted. But the problem is that Saw II and III already went back and looked at how John became Jigsaw, and it did it a whole lot better. In the previous two films we’re made to believe that John was a normal guy who had his world turned upside down with a terminal cancer diagnosis, and that after failing an attempt at suicide decided that if his body had the will to live then he would test other peoples will to live, people who had done bad things and, in his eyes, didn’t deserve to live whilst he died.
But Saw IV establishes that John was actually always an asshole with a God complex. He controls minute details about his wife’s life and work, he feels the need to preach to everyone about how much morally superior he is to them, and all it ends up doing is causing his wife to lose their baby and her to divorce him, just before he gets the cancer diagnosis. This removes any relatability that John had as Jigsaw. Whilst his philosophy was flawed and his methods were excessively violent, it’s certainly easy to see things from his point of view in the first two sequels. But Saw IV now makes us realise that John was never a nice guy and this probably would have happened regardless of his cancer diagnosis, that he was just a bomb waiting to go off.
The one thing I actually like about Saw IV is the scene transitions. I swear that these transitions are so much better than they have any right to be and they’ve probably had the most amount of thought and care put into them in comparison to anything else in this film. The scenes just melt into each other seamlessly, and whilst this can occasionally make things difficult to follow, you’re usually able to catch on pretty quick that there’s been a time jump or a location change. But what then makes it confusing is how the scenes themselves are put together. It seems like the basic rules of filmmaking went out of the window with crossed shots, poor framing, and so many cuts between different camera angles that I genuinely think the purpose of the film is to have you wondering what the hell is happening, so you don’t notice all the gaping holes in the story, or the awful performances and script.
Saw IV should be avoided like the plague, yet surprisingly enough it’s not the lowest the series stoops to. It takes everything good from Saw III and ruins it, tainting that film in retrospect. It takes a truly awful film to not only screw up what it’s trying to do, but also screw up everything good about its predecessors.
Whilst fans of the series are certainly going to watch it to continue the story, you’re actually probably better off skipping it entirely and just reading a plot summary somewhere. It’ll make a lot more sense and it probably put together by more talented people than the morons behind this dumpster fire.
Saw IV should be avoided like the plague, yet surprisingly enough it’s not the lowest the series stoops to. It takes everything good from Saw III and ruins it, tainting that film in retrospect. It takes a truly awful film to not only screw up what it’s trying to do, but also screw up everything good about its predecessors.
Whilst fans of the series are certainly going to watch it to continue the story, you’re actually probably better off skipping it entirely and just reading a plot summary somewhere. It’ll make a lot more sense and it probably put together by more talented people than the morons behind this dumpster fire.