As I continue working my way through the Saw franchise, we’ve officially arrived at what I like to call the Tales of Hoffman era. If there has ever been a less inspired replacement killer in horror history, I’m struggling to think of one.
One thing the Saw sequels absolutely love doing is circling back to previous films and pretending there were major revelations hiding in plain sight the entire time. Every sequel seems determined to convince us that events from earlier movies were secretly much more important than we realized. Saw IV leans heavily into that approach, but it does so while dealing with a pretty significant problem: John Kramer is dead. Jigsaw is gone, and now someone else has picked up the mantle.
In previous films, we saw John punish people for what he viewed as moral failings. We watched him build traps designed to make people appreciate what they had. We even saw him offer a grieving father the opportunity to confront the drunk driver responsible for killing his son. There was at least some twisted logic behind his actions.
Saw IV picks Detective Rigg as its central victim. Rigg is a police officer with a strong moral compass who constantly tries to do the right thing. He’s determined to help people and refuses to give up on finding his missing partner. Naturally, according to this movie, that means he deserves to be punished.The entire premise revolves around Jigsaw forcing Rigg through a series of tests intended to teach him to let things go.What?
The film essentially takes one of the few genuinely decent people in the series and decides that his greatest flaw is caring too much. It’s a baffling concept that never really works, no matter how hard the screenplay tries to justify it.Outside of some decent gore and maybe one or two traps that stand out, this felt like a complete waste of time. The more I get to know Hoffman, the less interesting he becomes. Giving him the reins of the franchise for the next several films remains a baffling creative decision. Saw IV highlights that problem by building an entire movie around a character who lacks the presence needed to carry it.
The acting doesn’t help. Costas Mandylor is incredibly dull as Hoffman, bringing almost no charisma to the role. Lyriq Bent has far more screen presence and is much easier to invest in, but the script doesn’t give him enough to work with. At this point, it feels like the revolving door of directors and writers behind these sequels assumes fans only show up for the traps.That assumption probably explains why so many of these movies have such poor Rotten Tomatoes scores. The problem isn’t that critics don’t understand them. The problem is that they’re simply not very good movies. The scripts aren’t strong. The plots are increasingly ridiculous. The characters often exist solely to move from one trap to the next. This becomes more and more evident as the Saw franchise progresses, and more people seem to pop up with little backstory as to why they are in a trap, so we won’t care when their body is ripped apart.
I was happy to see audio description included here courtesy of Descriptive Video Works, with narration by Paula Hoffman. As always, quality accessibility is something worth celebrating. Unfortunately, great audio description can’t save a film that fundamentally isn’t working.
The worst part? Believe it or not, it actually gets worse from here.
Rotten: 4.9/10
