If you took Jeremy Renner, Matt Damon, and Ben Affleck, and molded their faces to create a new man, you would get Matt Passmore, the leading role in Jigsaw. Jigsaw is the 8th movie in the Saw franchise. 8th! It’s also the first Saw movie not be called Saw. I mean there’s still saw in the title, but now there’s a jig in front of it to make it feel modern and fresh so that this film wouldn’t be called Saw 8.

from IMDB.com

The first Saw film I would acclaim as a good film and its offspring are all a subset of the horror genre that aren’t really scary but are aptly described as torture porn. If you think Marvel films are by the book in terms of being formulaic, the Saw franchise has a formula engraved in a stone tablet. Another series that has a similar approach is the Final Destination franchise.

The first film was based more in the mystery of a serial killer. The identity of the jigsaw serial killer was what we wanted to know, and his methodology wasn’t teeming in the spotlight. After the first Saw movie, the rest of the films were based on highlighting the methodology first, followed by a mystery twist hidden in plain sight.

Jigsaw continues on with the latter tradition of being a movie about Jigsaw’s methodology over the identity of the culprit. It’s not that the film takes Jigsaw’s identity lightly, could it be the original? Or yet another disciple or copycat killer of the original? The motives are important as always. The Jigsaw killer is an altruistic killer who subscribes to the eye for an eye principle literally. Jigsaw’s victims are murderers and thieves as they always are.

Jigsaw makes his victims play a serious of “games” as he calls them, and this is where the film earns its market share. The games are devised as a pain puzzle. The participants have to either solve the riddle Jigsaw delivers to them through tape recorder or they must incur a certain amount of pain to find a way out of the trap they are caught in.

Jigsaw is another movie for Saw fans that enjoy the premise of the films stated above. It has all the required indicators.

For the unbiased viewer, these movies are not really that good while never being totally unwatchable. The Saw films are definitely unwatchable for those that can’t handle intense gore.

What Jigsaw does well enough to balance out it’s pacing is cutting between the investigatory scenes with the victims fighting for their survival in Jigsaw’s game. The investigative scenes are usually a smokescreen billowing up to stray you away from who the jigsaw killer is. Passmore plays Logan Nelson, an autopsy surgeon and his assistant is Eleanor Bonneville played by Hannah Emily Anderson. Their names, along with every name in the movie is mostly forgettable. There’s not much reason to get invested into the characters as there’s not really any protagonists or rooting interests in Jigsaw. This is the main reason these films aren’t acclaimed critically or by a general audience.

The film is more directed at shock value than telling a story. If you’ve seen one deadly pain puzzle trap, you’ll see another variation of one later. It doesn’t take long to become desensitized to the traps themselves and the eventual blood and gore that follows.

There’s not much else to say about Jigsaw as it does nothing to distinguish itself. One of the more memorable traps was levied on a motorcycle mechanic named Mitch who sold a faulty bike to the original Jigsaw killer John Kramer who sporadically appears and is referenced in this rendition. Tobin Bell reprises the role. The trap that Mitch finds himself in is devised around a motorcycle engine where Mitch has to stop the engine by hitting the brakes. Mitch is forced to reach through a fastly rotating sharp object and let’s just say he doesn’t come out of this trap on the better end. The scene is highlighted by action rocker music as one of the other victims, Anna, attempts to save Mitch from being ground up into human remains.

The directors are Michael and Peter Spierig who came off an Ethan Hawke starring Predestination, which scored well in audience and reviewer ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. You can assume Jigsaw wasn’t exactly a follow up induced to increase their directorial clout. But if you are curious like me, Jigsaw has a 90% favorable Rotten Tomatoes score for audience reviews. The user ratings on IMDB are at 5.8 which is very low so there is an odd inconsistency there. This either means most of the audience reviews on RT are from Saw fans or the Russian bots are pushing for another Saw movie.

A $38 million dollar gross last reported in 2017 doesn’t sound like too much but the film is estimated at a $10 million dollar budget. The Saw films prove to be a low-cost low-risk option because fans will watch even if Jeremy Renner’s stunt double is the star of the film.