I don’t normally watch the Saw movies, due to having a strong dislike of mutiliation. While gory deaths are fine, what Saw does is…not like that. However, I watched Jigsaw, which I felt was cleverly done, so I decided to give this movie a try.
I don’t know a whole lot about the lore of the Saw movies, but I know this is a direct sequel to the first movie and a prequel to the others, due to the fact that John Kramer is still alive…even if that’s barely.
Compared to most horror movie villains, Kramer seems to have more a moral code…or at least rules he abides by. From what I know of the Saw franchise, he targets people who aren’t ‘good’, such as corrupt police officers, or murderers who escaped justice. And this movie was no exception, with Kramer targeting a group of fake ‘doctors’ who pretended to cure his cancer, but instead took his money and fled. And he wasn’t the first one they’d done this to. So, theoretically, Kramer was taking revenge on people who had targeted victims at their most vulnerable, the very worst kind of con artists.
With perhaps one exception, I didn’t really care about the people caught in Jigsaw’s traps. Sure, they kept on apologising…promising to return his money…desperately promising that there really was a cure. But there was no genuine remorse there; nothing to show that any of them, except perhaps one, deserved a chance to live.
The traps utilised in this movie were very much more gruesome than clever…and I didn’t really feel like the group was actually given true chances to survive. Kramer defended his own actions, saying that the injuries could be treated and that a damaged brain had even been proven to form new connections to keep on going. However, it was far more likely that trap would kill someone; if not by the person failing the trap, then by causing too much damage to their own brain by cutting out random pieces. And radiation poisoning is still going to cause death, but a slow and painful one…so in this movie, I felt strongly that Kramer had gone against his own moral code in that even if his victims survived the immediate, they’d still end up dying before their natural time.
I found it interesting to see that Amanda had some empathy for Gabriela. While I could agree to a certain extent with Kramer’s comments about everyone making their own choices, I also agree that they had no idea what had happened in Gabriela’s past to cause her to be addicted to drugs…or even if she was forced into that addiction. Out of all of the group Kramer kidnaps, Gabriela was the only one I felt actually deserved to live.
On the whole, this movie was an interesting addition to the Saw franchise, but I felt it was more about the shock and gore factor than about exploring more of the world and motivations of the main characters. I definitely feel like the rules and moral code were bent, if not outright broken, at times. If you’re a fan of the Saw franchise, you’d probably enjoy this movie. For me, I only watched Jigsaw and Spiral and this one – and so far, Jigsaw’s been the only one that engaged me enough to consider watching a second time.
Ink of Blood 