Saw 3 production still
© Lionsgate

Mania Grade: B
Maniac Grade: A-
Reviewed Format: Theatrical Release
Rated: R
Stars: Tobin Bell, Shawnee Smith, Angus Macfadyen, Bahar Soomekh, Dina Meyer
Writers: Leigh Whannell, story by Leigh Whannel and James Wan
Director: Darren Lynn Bousman
Distributor: Lionsgate Pictures

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"Saw III"

As SAW fans know, and as newbies entering the theatre soon learn, Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) sees himself as an avenging angel/instructor whose fiendish and all-but-impossible-to-escape traps are in fact designed to prove to suicidal or apathetic folks that they really do want to live. Of course, by then it's usually too late, but...

When we last saw Jigsaw, he was extremely ill, but his healthy disciple Amanda (Shawnee Smith) has spirited him to safety. Jigsaw isn't too frail to put two new people through the mill: there's Jeff (Angus Macfadyen), who's become alcoholic and neglectful of his young daughter after the hit-and-run death of his young son, and Lynn (Bahar Soomekh), a good doctor bordering on apathy when she's kidnapped by Amanda so that she can minister to Jigsaw.

Writer Leigh Whannell (who wrote both previous SAWs), working on the story with James Wan (who directed and co-wrote SAW I), has taken all the moments where a story-oriented viewer might well have thought, "Wait a minute" -- in the previous installments and come up with some good explanations while laying the groundwork for the current film. There's actually a message here, amidst all the blood and gore, which, paradoxically, the real-life less violent among us will find pleasing. The one caveat here is that a final twist, necessary to prolong the series, seems to revive the contradictions that the SAW III story has just spent putting to bed, but you can't win them all.

While there are a variety of supporting characters here (most of whom meet awful fates), there's actually a pretty good chamber drama with the assured Bell, the versatile Smith and the expressive Soomekh all working together in their scenes together, and Macfadyen showing a great range of emotions as a man desperately trying to find his better nature.

Director Darren Lynn Bousman, who also helmed SAW II, once again plunges us into deepest grunge -- half the horror of the SAW franchise is the grotesque, despair-inducing environs -- and gets plenty of mileage out of both the gore and the evil Rube Goldberg set-ups.

As a horror movie, SAW III is more creepy than scary. As the third installment in a trilogy, it makes a good case for its existence on its own terms and as part of a whole, rather than as just a retread of the original premise.