I’m sure I’ve upset Saw fans by this point, but then again, so do most critics. These films have never exactly been critical darlings, and most of them struggle to stay above water. The fact that by the end of this franchise I’ll have handed out four Fresh scores feels generous enough. This won’t be one of them.

I despise Hoffman. His version of Jigsaw feels like one of those misguided attempts to replace an iconic character with someone who completely misses the point. Jigsaw passing the torch to Amanda made sense because we actually watched her suffer, change, and earn that position. Hoffman, meanwhile, spends four films calling the shots while somehow becoming more capable than Jigsaw himself. For a guy who started as part of the team, he’s oddly unstoppable whenever he’s operating alone. It is amazing how John utilized a street team, and Hoffman has time management skills to be a cop investigating himself, and still set up and run all these trap houses.

After killing off one of the few genuinely decent characters in Saw IV, essentially for the crime of being a good guy, Hoffman now finds himself facing Agent Strahm. The film builds toward that confrontation, complete with a final twist that Strahm never sees coming. If nothing else, Saw V remains committed to wrapping itself around previous installments and pretending it was all planned from the beginning. There is a certain shameless confidence in that approach, and it seems to be a signature of the series.

The bigger problem is the game itself. Saw V features perhaps the least memorable group of victims in the series so far, with some of the murkiest motivations behind their selection. The pendulum trap is admittedly effective, and it’s one of the few sequences that actually sticks in the memory. We also get the promise that Jill is about to become more important to the story, which gave me hope at the time. Unfortunately, the series commits to Hoffman, and ineffectually uses Jill.

Hoffman’s approach to choosing victims feels completely random. People are punished for increasingly inane reasons, abandoning the warped life lessons that at least gave Jigsaw’s philosophy some internal logic. By this point, the filmmakers seem convinced audiences only show up for the gore and the traps, so they make the victims disposable and largely anonymous. Yet at the same time, they’re busy constructing an increasingly elaborate mythology around the franchise. The result is a film that wants us deeply invested in its lore while giving us almost no reason to care about the people trapped inside it.

I did appreciate the audio description from Descriptive Video Works, which does an admirable job navigating both the violence and the growing ensemble of characters. Unfortunately, it exists on a film I never need to watch again.

Saw V is just another dreary and pointless extension of the franchise.

Rotten: 4.7/10