Saw V (2008)

THIS REVIEW WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS!

2 + 3 = 5.

Just as this is true, it seems that Saw V is just Saw II and Saw III rolled into one ugly mess. Granted, this film is not as boring, confusing and downright rubbish as Saw IV, but it is still terribly lacklustre.

At the end of Saw IV we found out that Agent Strahm (Scott Patterson) looks exactly like Mark Hoffman (Costas Mandylor) and this means that trying to piece together events is rather confusing. This lead me to believe, at first, that the ending to Saw IV was more confusing than it actually was. I wrote the review after figuring out they were two completely different people.

A shame, then, that these two people are the leads for this film. Strahm is boringly going on a hunt for knowledge, attempting to discover who the hell put him in some crazy trap that goes against the rules laid out by the films by having no instructions and no way of escape unless Strahm improvises, which he does.

Strahm's research teaches us that Hoffman is a bad guy, which we figured out from the end of Saw IV. However, what we didn’t know is that Hoffman has a slightly different story to Amanda Young, so obviously it needs to be shown in near entirety. Which is boring, because I honestly don’t care. If they simply showed the reason why Hoffman is Kramer’s apprentice then I wouldn’t have minded, but this film decides to show every little step to Hoffman becoming Jigsaw Killer V2.0.

The film, like Saw II, starts off with an opening kill, which is annoying enough. But it gets moronic as it turns out Hoffman created the elaborate device before becoming an apprentice. Where did this detective get his engineering know-how? The film doesn’t answer this. Obviously this is something we don’t need to know about this guy’s backstory.

The game set up is boring to watch too. It is set up in four rooms with five players, going from the first room to the next and to the next. The game seems to require Darwinian “survival of the fittest” gameplay, but in an obvious twist it turns out they were meant to work together, and they totally could have, in order to finish properly and not be terrifyingly mutilated and risk further death.

But wait, what about the third room, which has a bath in the middle of it where an electrical current must pass through to open the next door. But this can only happen if someone is in the bath, therefore dying due to electric shock. They couldn’t all grab a cord and do it individually as they would all run the risk of dying. So this defeats the purpose of the end room!

Yet again, the directing and editing annoys me, and all of the characters try their best to make me hate them. But it doesn’t feel as bad as Saw IV. At least, it isn’t as offensive. Kramer gets to come back for some more flashbacks and he is back to his usual self. Nonetheless, this film still sucks and I don’t recommend it. Just watch Saw II and Saw III, then try to imagine them condensed into one film.

Final Verdict: 2/10