31 Days of Halloween: SAW X
The opening of this marathon deserves a Saw X review. The return of John Kramer is all it’s cracked up to be, and mostly because you get more John Kramer in your killer John Kramer movie. Yep, instead of Tobin Bell sitting in the background like an idiot, he’s actually the main character in this movie and does stuff, becoming the guy we’re rooting for, because that’s what these movies have become at this point. The movie is structured that way so Kramer can capture a bunch of evil people and play a little game. It’s not checkers.
John Kramer has an arc and plays a buncha games. That’s right, this movie has all of what you expect and more, not just gore gore gore: there’s a Kramer character arc, a little drama and a twist ending (of course). The movie takes place after the original Saw where Kramer has cancer and is early on in his serial killer career. He falls for a Mexico cure-all scam, so he’s either really desperate or really dumb. Or maybe he’s sick. He manipulates a complicated twist ending so I guess he’s not that dumb really, but Kramer discovers it was a scam relatively quickly, and he’s pissed. He calls up Amanda (Shawnee Smith) to help him and gets Hoffman’s help too, although he doesn’t bother to show up to help with the traps. The familiar “games” kick off about half way in, with a couple other murders and other interesting stuff in between, which I thought was a bold choice for a Saw movie because most of the movie is setup. They’re relying on the John Kramer character to carry this thing and I think they just about pulled it off.
Unfortunately, the movie is mostly predicatible. That doesn’t mean it isn’t fun and really entertaining to watch, but most of the plot is spoiled in the trailer for God’s sake. John’s trip to Mexico to get “cured” of cancer is spelled out in the trailer as his motivation to get back at these scam artists, pretending to be doctors. It’s questionable to spoil so much in the trailer in my opinion. Amanda’s appearance is in the trailer, plus Hoffman’s appearance AND his only line of dialogue is IN the trailer. That was hilarious. Most of the traps and the results of the story are not spoiled though, so that’s good but Saw X doesn’t rely on traps alone to sell the movie anyway. Unlike some of the previous sequels, gore is not the main focus, even though we expect these horrible, evil people to die and get Jigsaw’s version of justice (which they do). The twist where the tables are turned on John Kramer is predictible because this is a prequel and nobody expects Kramer to die, so I’m not sure what they were going for there. Kramer was going to come out on top, but I can let that go and just enjoy the movie the continued plotting against these evil idiots.
Overall, this is a good movie. It’s much better than I expected, and it’s really entertaining, mostly because of Tobin Bell as John Kramer. He was what was missing from the last movie with Chris Rock, and I think everybody knows now that he’s the franchise—he’s SAW: not (just) the traps and not (just) a buncha gore. It’s John Kramer. But he just doesn’t just participate as a voice or for a setup scene, he’s the main character, and he’s in almost every scene. He does a good job and his performance is good. Shawnee Smith is tolerable and almost goes over-the-top a couple times but she’s not given any long winded dialogue to do that, which is a good thing. The rest of the cast play their evil characters as irredeemable idiots, especially Synnøve Macody Lund as Cecilia, the main villain behind the medical con. She does a good job but her character really has nothing likeable about her. I liked the callbacks to the previous Saw movies and the buildup is fun to watch. Saw X does a great job as a new entry into this franchise and it looks like they’ve learned from the past, giving us more Tobin Bell than we expected plus much more.
The 31 Days of Halloween movie marathon has been going on since 2014 and features movie reviews every single day right here on this blog. This year’s challenge is if I can survive 90s horror. In between, I will be looking at the latest releases like Saw X and Five Night’s at Freddy’s. Thanks for supporting me and this blog since 2014 and I hope everyone can continue reading. If you have any comments or messages, please follow and leave them below.