Saw X
It’s not often that the tenth installment of a successful franchise corrects the sins of past films, but if anything could have sent the people behind this cash cow back to the drawing board, it was the failure of “Spiral From the Book of Saw.” “Saw X” fixes many of the problems that other entries in this series suffer from by narrowing its focus, streamlining some (but not all) of its convoluted plotting, creating a few clever traps and centering on this franchise’s true keys. Tobin Bell and Shawnee Smith. They’re both better here than they are in any other movie in this series, resurrecting these characters in a way that feels more emotionally resonant than most of the puppeteering they’ve done in previous installments. And the punishments just seem to fit the crimes here a little better than they did in some of the earlier chapters, when it sometimes felt like Jigsaw was working too hard to kill people who might have just had a bad day or forgotten to call their grandmother.
This time around, it’s personal. Kevin Greutert’s film opens with an extended series of dramatic scenes interspersed with Jigsaw imagining one trap after another for would be killers as if someone said in a producer’s note, “We can’t go half an hour without something gnarly.” Outside of those fantasies, during his opening act John Kramer (Bell) discovers what would become known as his mortality diagnosis. If you’re thinking things like “Wait didn’t that happen already?” and “Hold on John Kramer is dead!” you should know that this one takes place between “Saw” and “Saw II,” so Kramer has already become Jigsaw but he isn’t quite yet deceased.
The first act of “Saw X” allows Bell to actually play through coming to terms with dying early (which fans know wouldn’t ironically be what ultimately kills him). He goes to therapy, where he meets a man (Michael Beach) who also has little time left on Earth. When he bumps into the group member again later and finds out that he’s been cured, the once hopeless patient doesn’t just have a new lease on life but an entirely different face. The chance of a miracle cure leads Kramer down to Dr. Cecilia Pederson (Synnove Macody Lund), who’s performing brain surgeries in Mexico because she needs to conduct her experiments way off the grid. But of course, Cecilia and her team of professionals are running a terrible con game, stealing dying people’s money and promising them the worst kind of false hope for their loved ones’ future as they’re left with nothing but medical bills and empty pockets. They picked the wrong person this time.
In the past, the setup for a “Saw” movie has often been messy and convoluted an issue that is instantly rectified by this one’s delicious simplicity: We see people do something terrible to John Kramer (Tobin Bell), and he locks them in a room to play his games. Plus fan-favorite Amanda (Shawnee Smith) is on hand to help with a few of Jigsaw’s most elaborate devices. Soon enough, someone is using an intestine as a rope, and another victim is performing brain surgery on themselves. At least the first few traps have a clever synergy in that the people who faked surgery now have to actually do it; all of the traps are better designed and executed than most of the sequels’.
But what mostly works about “Saw X” is how transparently Kramer and Amanda are involved in the action. There’s significantly less “man behind the curtain” stuff here as Kramer states his motives and the stakes clearly two things that have often been foggy in this franchise which allows Bell to dig into his role with more screen time than ever, somehow making John Kramer sympathetic while he tortures people. Shawnee Smith doesn’t have quite as much to do, but she sells a few nice beats because she knows this series and what it needs.
That was my problem with many recent “Saw” movies. They got away from what worked by cluttering up their narratives with characters nobody cared about learning lessons that seemed kind of poorly taught. It wouldn’t be right to say that “Saw X” gets back to basics that would involve just two people in a room and an actual saw but there is something more grounded about this film than any of its many sequels. “Saw X” returns John Kramer back to where he started, forcing him once again to show people the error of their ways and ask them what it really means to be alive; a few severed limbs along the way are just a bonus.
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