The acting is terrible, the direction is terrible, the script is terrible, the pacing is terrible and the "twist" and traps are all.you guessed it.terrible. I wouldn't recommend seeing Saw: Legacy, er, I mean, Saw VIII, um, Jigsaw! *** Final thoughts: After my Sawathon, here's how they rank: 1. Only, this time they had 7 years to come up with something! They just blew it with a rehash of one of the worst in the original seven. (If this was the case, then I will give them credit for that.) This movie did have potential, but it felt like it was written as quickly as the previously 1-per-year scripts. Perhaps they were meant as jokes to poke fun at their own series as the characters did constantly mock the designs as well. Some of the traps were so hilariously bad, I seriously couldn't figure out if that was intentional or not. Extremely minor things were updated (new technology – sort of – from the last outings,) but barely anything was new or brought in to refresh the series. The games played were enormously lame, the tired setups seem ancient and the gore factor was so dialed back, I thought I was watching the most gruesome scenes from the "vampire" movie, Twilight. Will there be redemption? Well, not for the series. Will there be red herrings? Of course, but like the twists, you'll know who's behind this. Will there be twists? Sure, but you predict them from the start. As in Saw-lore, the movie shifts from the cop side to a Jigsaw game. Basically, it's 10 years later and immediately as the movie opens, the game begins again. It was so mild, so held-back, my original positive turns into a negative whereas the creators forgot how much blood there should be. ![]() ![]() Speaking of over, this is absolute overkill, only less on the killing. And when it was over, it needed to be over. It did feel like one long (approx.) 11-hour miniseries and, yeah, that did make the series feel complete. In a series that I originally thought got progressively worse, I found a little comfort in how closely tied the first seven were. ![]() Maybe it was a hindrance that I decided to spend the entire 7 days prior to Jigsaw's release watching one Saw movie a day. The most positive thing I could say about Part Eight of the Saw franchise is that the crew knew what made the latter part of the series' memorable: flashbacks, twists, bad acting and terrible dialogue. Was this PG-13? It sure felt like it was and Expendable. And if the decide to make another one, just don't rehash the same stuff over and over and over again. Early Saws used to be great, but this movie, and several previous ones, are just plain bad and the franchise needs to be put to rest at this point. Other traps required pretty much clairvoyance from the Jigsaw, because to set up them the way they went, he would have to see the fricking future. And most of the traps were just plain dumb, some of them giving a lot of room for cheating, which broke the immersion for me, because the "gamers" were acting like idiots who for some reason switched their brains off and walked into them like sheep. In fact, I since I saw all the Saws (pun intended) I was able to correctly guess what the final reveal will be because like I said, they already done it before. I won't go into details because of spoilers, but every time some plot twist happened in the movie I was like "Wait, they already did that in Saw X". Not only they rehashed many ideas from the previous movies, but the final reveal was also done SEVERAL times in the previous saws. The Good: Passable twist Tobin Bell The Bad: Still not coming close to its origins Essentially more of the same Things I Learnt From This Movie: I still love Jigsaws style and struggle to see him as an antagonist Let SAW die before it becomes another franchise whose credibility is gone because it's creators didn't know when to stop. ![]() I'd advise fans of the franchise give this a go but truly believe that this should be the last. It doesn't however come close to the dizzying heights of the first few films. So here we have another game, another spate of killings in gruesome fashion but this time it looks like Jigsaw is really back from the grave! Sprinkled with good ideas Jigsaw is certainly an improvement on other recent efforts and delivers a few twists along the way. These things need to know when to call it a day and SAW didn't. The movies gradually got worse and worse and they felt desperate, blatant cash ins and it was such a shame that such a franchise had become tarnished. I think the SAW series started off very well, they showed real promise were clever well constructed movies but alas alike so many other horror franchises it got milked into mediocrity. Despite the last SAW movie being called "The Final Chapter" 2017 brought us yet another addition to the franchise and it's a real mixed bag.
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