NOTE: The following comment is written under the assumption that readers are familiar with the franchise and its general plot arc.
Saw V is a pretty lackluster film, a retread of themes, plots, characters and even specific events from the previous films of the canon. It fails on a lot of levels, but the main one is its insistence on telling us things we already know. The identity of Jigsaw's operative in the police force was revealed at the end of IV (a much better film in every way), and if we even WANTED to know the reasons that this particular cop 'went over to the dark side', we certainly wanted it to be a much more interesting and involving story than the one V gives us. We could, and a lot of us probably already have supposed every generic plot point in this character's origins story. We wouldn't have guessed the specifics, but as usual, the specifics don't matter.
Once this recurring flashback tale of transformation has revealed itself to be pretty un-challenging, we're left only with the even blander present-day plot of The Other Cop (excluding the cutaway sequences of an ongoing five-person 'game', which is robbed by its very cutaway nature of any tension and which feels pretty irrelevant throughout). This non-flashback story has nothing to it: the cop who survived the last three films without being Jigsaw's buddy is onto the one who is, and he very stupidly spends all his time walking from dark room to dark room, talking to himself and failing to report his incriminating findings to anyone. Needless to say, things do not end well.
And it *is* needless to say this: that's another thing Saw V seems to forget. The film treats its fatalistic and unhappy ending as though it retains the shock that the first film's equally fatalistic and unhappy ending delivered. It doesn't. We are by now very, very wise to the franchise's policy on endings and closure, and we know that the good guys are all doomed. When we get what we know is coming, the natural response is to be quite profoundly unimpressed.
I loved the fourth Saw film. I thought it did really new and exciting things with a premise that didn't even originate with the intelligence that was eventually given it. I thought it made really relevant points about ideological warfare and the fundamental horror of terrorism. And I thought it set the series up for some great explorable terrain. What follows is a monumental backslide, a film that does nothing new and doesn't even revert to used material very well (fans who are just after gore are also going to be disappointed - there's not much of it). I came out of the theatre feeling like I was still waiting for the fifth Saw film to get made.
Saw V is a pretty lackluster film, a retread of themes, plots, characters and even specific events from the previous films of the canon. It fails on a lot of levels, but the main one is its insistence on telling us things we already know. The identity of Jigsaw's operative in the police force was revealed at the end of IV (a much better film in every way), and if we even WANTED to know the reasons that this particular cop 'went over to the dark side', we certainly wanted it to be a much more interesting and involving story than the one V gives us. We could, and a lot of us probably already have supposed every generic plot point in this character's origins story. We wouldn't have guessed the specifics, but as usual, the specifics don't matter.
Once this recurring flashback tale of transformation has revealed itself to be pretty un-challenging, we're left only with the even blander present-day plot of The Other Cop (excluding the cutaway sequences of an ongoing five-person 'game', which is robbed by its very cutaway nature of any tension and which feels pretty irrelevant throughout). This non-flashback story has nothing to it: the cop who survived the last three films without being Jigsaw's buddy is onto the one who is, and he very stupidly spends all his time walking from dark room to dark room, talking to himself and failing to report his incriminating findings to anyone. Needless to say, things do not end well.
And it *is* needless to say this: that's another thing Saw V seems to forget. The film treats its fatalistic and unhappy ending as though it retains the shock that the first film's equally fatalistic and unhappy ending delivered. It doesn't. We are by now very, very wise to the franchise's policy on endings and closure, and we know that the good guys are all doomed. When we get what we know is coming, the natural response is to be quite profoundly unimpressed.
I loved the fourth Saw film. I thought it did really new and exciting things with a premise that didn't even originate with the intelligence that was eventually given it. I thought it made really relevant points about ideological warfare and the fundamental horror of terrorism. And I thought it set the series up for some great explorable terrain. What follows is a monumental backslide, a film that does nothing new and doesn't even revert to used material very well (fans who are just after gore are also going to be disappointed - there's not much of it). I came out of the theatre feeling like I was still waiting for the fifth Saw film to get made.