Saw 4

Review by Anthony Morris

When reviewing a Saw film, a lot of the usual rules don't apply.

Right from the first film the plots have been silly, the performances poor, the unrelenting focus on gore (and more importantly, the approach to the gore, where the audience is meant to cheer on each new violation rather than be horrified by it) frankly boring, the lighting murky, the camerawork pedestrian... And yet, who cares? 

Each film in the series has been pushed along by its own cheesy pulp energy, where villain Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) provides some lame moralising speech as some unpleasant type has their arms torn off or their hair dragged through a variety of tightly meshing gears in an inventively nasty demise. 

So the good news is that Saw 4 is basically more of the same, even though the film begins with Jigsaw very, very dead (his autopsy is shown in ghoulish detail).

For one thing, Jigsaw's kept alive through a variety of fairly dull and pointless flashbacks providing him with an origin story that manages to make him less scary. For another, the story here is exactly the same as every other Saw movie: stupid cops act confused while someone stumbles through a variety of death traps that kill a lot of people we don’t really care about. 

The bad news is that the death traps just aren't all that memorable this time around, and without them the rapid-fire editing and blaring soundtrack just feel like desperate attempts to keep the audience awake. 

Still, Saw 4 does do what it’s supposed to, even if originality isn’t part of its job description. It’s just that these days torture just doesn’t seem as much fun as it used to.

2 out of 5

Saw 4
Australian release: 25th October, 2007
Cast: Tobin Bell, Lyriq Bent, Costas Mandylor
Director: Darren Lynn Bousman
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