Jigsaw

Starring: Matt Passmore, Tobin Bell, Callum Keith Rennie

Directors: Michael Spierig, Peter Spierig

A sense of nostalgia accompanies the appearance of the Twisted Pictures logo onscreen, a logo I've seen now six or seven times prior, with its animated sinews of barbed wire promising a gory good time, a remix of the Saw theme playing in the background. My nostalgia is somewhat dampened with a by-the-numbers opening cop chase. It returns with a vengeance when the cops, in a firing squad of a standoff, blow the hand off of their suspect, Edgar Munsen (Josiah Black). No, seriously, it explodes. As he’s lying on the ground, he whispers to the lead detective, Halloran (Callum Keith Rennie) that “the game has already begun.” I am reassured once more that that this is indeed a Saw movie. Cut to a ragtag cast of characters, who are most likely all connected in some way, waking up in a convoluted trap involving circular saws, chains, and helmets that look like buckets. This sequence has never happened before per se in the franchise, but it fees like it could have–might as well have–and then I remember that this is in fact the eighth Saw movie.

The Saw franchise is very much like its central character in that just when it seems it couldn’t possibly come back, it does, and it is very into its own rules. The series, very early on, wrote itself into a rather challenging corner when it (spoilers for Saw III, but who cares really?) killed off its main antagonist in an unambiguous and decisive manner. Jigsaw, alias John Kramer (Tobin Bell), has been dead for four movies up to and including Saw 3D: The Final Chapter, and the way the writers have worked around this has been through heavy usage of flashbacks and copycats. The major premise of Jigsaw is that maybe, just maybe…the moralistic and vindictive Jigsaw didn’t actually die in the third movie. To the movie’s credit once more, there are no cliched “he’s back,” lines, but the movie can’t help but indulge in a side character–the perplexing coroner’s assistant, Eleanor (Hannah Emily Anderson)–muttering to herself, upon finding the signature puzzle piece scar on one of his victims: “Jig-mutherf**king-Saw.”

Detective Halloran, his partner Keith (Clè Bennett), the coroner–a man named Logan Nelson (Matt Passmore)–and the coroner’s assistant Eleanor are all racing against the clock to find out if Jigsaw is indeed back, and how they can stop him from taking more innocent lives. Of course, as we jump between the manhunt and Jigsaw’s game, which is centered around each “player” confessing their sins, it becomes very clear no one is innocent. You root for different individuals moment to moment, only to be disappointed when the “group project” mentality of the puzzles pushes someone to do something just irrationally stupid. Meanwhile, there’s so much finger-pointing between Detective Halloran’s team and Coroner Logan’s team that the film almost seems to be without a protagonist, though in a different movie the Wonderbread War Veteran Logan and Manic Pixie Gore Girl Eleanor would be an interesting duo indeed.

If one were to sum up what Jigsaw is about–besides dismemberin’ and puzzlin’–it is about death of the author. No, that’s too generous. It’s about fan fiction, which is best seen in an early exchange between Detective Hunt and Logan, as Hunt implicates Eleanor

as a possible copycat of Jigsaw’s. Halloran and Hunt have found in her search history frequent visits to a site called “Jigsaw Rules,” which I like to think was a working title for this movie. Another moment that feels like fan fiction is when one of Jigsaw’s victims, Ryan (Paul Braunstein), sees the Jigsaw Doll on the tricycle and says sarcastically, camera fully centered on his face, “oh, that’s not creepy at all.” You probably saw that moment in the trailer. Its inclusion in the marketing seems to hint at Saw going the Chucky route of ironic self-parody, but in truth this is the movie’s one moment of intentional levity.

To me the most perplexing part of this movie really is Eleanor, who quickly fesses up in a private chat with Logan that she indeed visits the "Jigsaw Rules" site, going so far as to show him her “studio” where she keeps old Jigsaw traps while making replicas of her own. The movie’s tone regarding Eleanor made me cringe a lot more than a moment when a character’s face is shown dissolving from acid injected into their system, as she is repeatedly asked accusatorially if she “gets off” to these Jigsaw relics. Halloran repeatedly comments about her rear even as he suggests she could be the mastermind behind these new killings. Her response to these uncomfortable situations is always some sort of deflective sexual humor. I picture her, later on, recounting these exchanges to a member of the precinct’s human resources department, saying, exhaustedly, “I always just joke along, because then at least I’m driving the conversation.”

Ultimately Eleanor, like all of the other female characters in Jigsaw, is a prop, and to understand her purpose as such, one need look no further than her hair or what color it has been specifically dyed for this film. It’s a shame, because despite the movie’s certainty that I would find the mystery of Jigsaw and Logan/Halloran’s competition to find the truth most interesting, I repeatedly was most intrigued by Anna (Laura Vandervoort), one of Jigsaw’s victims, who seems to intuitively have the best idea of how to play his games. Until she doesn’t.

Presenting the plot spoiler-free is a challenge, because each Saw movie needs to have a twist to accompany that heavy violin stinger music at its climax. Scenes are presented in a way that only adds up if you don’t think about it too much. As contestants die off, for instance, Jigsaw leaves their bodies in convenient, almost mocking places for Halloran and his team to find (Hot Take: Is Jigsaw the “Now I Have a Machine Gun” scene in Die Hard from Hans Gruber’s perspective?). This takes place over a period that seems to be a week. Meanwhile the game takes four hours, tops. Yet these are presented as parallel, to the point that you know something’s up. The filmmakers–yet another Hollywood brother duo–Michael Spierig and Peter Spierig–seem to know you’re expecting the Z team for the cash-grab Saw movie, and to their credit, they play with those lowered expectations, surprising you with competence and intentionality. The movie, like Jigsaw’s puzzles, is littered with details that seem to be superfluous, but very much aren’t. Again, like Jigsaw’s games, the way these details are revealed doesn’t always feel fair.

Ultimately, there’s no reason you should be spending anything beyond a 99-cent rental to see this movie. It’s probably not even worth reviewing this in-depth, but I assume if you’re reading a review of Jigsaw, you are looking to be entertained. I am not even feigning humility when I say I hope I entertain you even half as much as this movie entertained me. It is not as grotesque or incompetent an effort as "The Final Chapter” (which I guess is a misnomer now), and is about the same level of a-bit-better-than-made-for-TV quality as its 3rd trough 6th installments, which I can’t imagine shelling out any money beyond Redbox cash to see. Beyond entertainment, the movie serves no real purpose to the Saw story arc, except for some general statements on the kind of impact a man like him would have, if he were real. It will doubtlessly bring some young people a great night of laughs and cringes in a dorm room when it drops on DVD. Is Jigsaw back? I won’t say, but I will say that the same producers who approved this movie were doubtlessly also pitched a plot where Jigsaw came back from the dead, and said, “No, that’s too dumb.”

C-