For those who may have been mercifully spared this flick’s predecessors, this agony involves subjecting a series of victims to a series of sadistic life-or-death games. Here, victims include racist skinheads, an assortment of ordinary folk and, most prominently, self-proclaimed Jigsaw survivor Bobby Dagen (Sean Patrick Flanery).
The nastiness is interspersed with boredom and punctuated by feeble attempts to make Jigsaw and Hoffman’s circus of dismemberment mean something. If their heinous high jinks signify anything at all, though, it’s simply this: that we live in a society where people will pay $12 of their presumably hard-earned cash and devote 91 minutes of their all-too-brief earthly lives to watching innards flying at them off a movie screen.
The film contains pervasive gory violence, with multiple scenes of torture, mutilation and disembowelment, a few uses of profanity and relentless rough and crude language. The Catholic News Service classification is O – morally offensive. The Motion Picture Association of America is R – restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.
Mulderig is on the staff of Catholic News Service. More reviews are available online.
