WHERE: Theaters everywhere.
WHEN: Now open.
RATING: R for strong grisly violence and gore, sequences of terror and torture, nudity and language.
RUNNING TIME: 107 minutes.
BOTTOM LINE: The gory franchise returns for a third - and, please, final - run.
When I reviewed the first "Saw" two years ago, I wrote that "movies like this exist only so filmmakers can mess with the viewer's mind, and moviegoers who allow it engage in tawdry masochism."
Now comes "Saw III," in which director Darren Lynn Bousman (who directed "Saw II") and screenwriter Leigh Whannell (who wrote the first and co-wrote the second) not only mess with the moviegoer's mind but the mechanics of the entire trilogy. In fact, this third installment so upends everything we thought we knew that even people who liked the original film (you know who you are, and I would prefer not speaking to you) may feel cheated.
After a gruesome and unnecessary prologue that rids us of the second movie's main characters (played by Dina Meyer and an unbilled Donnie Wahlberg), the movie gets to its main business of grossing us out with its lethal mechanical contraptions. The serial killer Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) is dying of an inoperable brain tumor, so his apprentice Amanda (Shawnee Smith) kidnaps Lynn (Bahar Soomekh), an emergency-room doctor charged with keeping Jigsaw alive or else. Meanwhile, Jigsaw and Amanda are running Jeff (Angus MacFadyen), a man mourning his son's death at the hands of a drunk driver, through a series of bloody tests.
All roads eventually lead back to the same dank bathroom where the first "Saw" played out, and there are even flashbacks to tell us we don't know the entire story. Not that it matters, as Whannell (who makes a strategic cameo) has never shown an interest in narrative coherence or characters even vaguely recognizable as human.
No, the currency in "Saw"-land is one bloody body part for every three rusty metal objects - and "Saw III" has plenty of both, all shot in garish detail and edited in a jumpy, caffeinated frenzy to make it even more vomit-inducing.
The only good thing to say about "Saw III" is that it seems, based on what happens in the finale, to be the last. Let us hope so, anyway.
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SEAN P. MEANS can be reached at movies@sltrib.com or 801-257-8602. Send comments about this review to livingeditor@sltrib.com
