USAToday
Claudia Puig
I came. I saw. I yawned.
Saw V is a terrible combination: grisly and tedious. Let's just call it bloody dull.
The latest installment in the torture-porn franchise is plodding, ponderous and even convoluted.
Sitting through it is torture of the worst cinematic kind. No amount of distraction in the form of spraying blood or severed limbs can lessen the blunt-force trauma of all the terrible performances.
It's almost as if it is written in the contracts to act as badly as possible, so as not to upstage the blood or decapitated heads.
Scott Patterson, so likable in TV's Gilmore Girls, wastes his talents returning as FBI Agent Strahm. Costas Mandylor plays Detective Hoffman woodenly. The two simply couldn't be any less interesting.
And the cold, calculating mastermind Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) dispenses his icy wisdom laced with clichés. Maybe he's softened a bit, allowing that "Killing is distasteful. If a subject survives my method, he or she is instantly rehabilitated."
It's a horror movie, so why must exposition be lazily communicated through close-ups of files, newspaper clippings and read-outs on cellphones? Presumably, this is to help those who missed the last four movies put the pieces of the Jigsaw murders together. It doesn't matter. It still won't be any good.
Ostensibly about justice, morality and the importance of working together (to avoid gruesome destruction), the plot is just an excuse to assault us yet again with horrific visuals. But somehow it feels tame, perhaps because the envelope has been pushed to the point of tearing apart.
Yes, the creepy killer knows who everyone is and soon we do, too. The problem is we just don't care.
The five victims enlisted as players in the creepy traps laid out for them are there for a reason. It turns out that they're all part of a real-estate development scam.
A real-estate deal gone bad? That's what horror movies are concerned with now? Did the makers of Saw V lose their homes in foreclosure? If so, the $30 million raked in at the box office last weekend ought to set things right.
As the stock market plummets and economic woes beset most of the planet, it's particularly galling to think that those responsible for this numbingly offensive and terribly made pseudo-entertainment have walked away with tens of millions of dollars.
Clearly, this fifth sequel is scraping the bottom of the barrel. Before they become nothing but 90 minutes of lackluster chopping, slicing, dicing and spurting, these rotting, stinking sequels need to be put on ice. Indefinitely.
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