RECENT WATCHES: Fast & Furious 6 (2013)

By 2013, the Marvel Cinematic Universe had come to rule the multiplexes. Other studios were eager to copy that successful formula. While there's been no shortage of superhero epics in the last decade, Universal managed to retrofit the “The Fast and the Furious” into something like their own Marvel universe  in one important way. That would be the mid-credit teasers setting up the next adventure. “Fast Five” ended in a fairly final place but a last minute scene happily set up another installment. Two years later, that promise would be delivered on with “Fast & Furious 6.” Justin Lin was back behind the camera, with the all the important cast members back too. Predictably, it was another enormous hit but could it top the last one in terms of action?

Hobbs is pursuing an internationally wanted super-criminal by the name of Owen Shaw. Shaw is attempting to assemble a “Nightshade” device, a weapon that can shut off all power in a country, and only needs one more part to complete it. He decides to lure Dom Torreto and the rest of his crew out of retirement to help him. He accomplishes this with one important clue. Letty, Dom's presumed dead wife, is part of Shaw's team. This convinces Dom, Brian, and the rest to gather in London and take down this newest threat, all while attempting to figure out what happened to Letty.

We're now six installments into this turbo-charged franchise and it's built up a surprisingly lovable ensemble. One of the simplest joys of “Fast & Furious 6” is simply watching these characters bounce off each other. The film delights in pairing these guys up in novel ways. Such as Rome and Han discussing the nuances of relationships or Rome and Tej shit-talking while playing around with a massive spear gun. Gal Gadot's Giselle – definitely the least well-defined of this troupe –  gets some charming moments, when interacting with Sung Kang or new recruit to the team, Gina Carano. We've built up enough of an attachment to this group that seeing them interact and screw around is as much fun as the enormous action set-pieces.

Something the “Fast” films have lacked, up to this point, are truly memorable enemies. The last two movies especially – I'm excluding Hobbs from this, as he eventually joins the good guys, "Dragonball Z" style – had indistinct crime bosses as their antagonists. “Furious 6” manages to cook up a supervillain worthy of its increasingly overpowered heroes. Luke Evans – who Hollywood was really trying to turn into a star in the 2010s – appears as Owen Shaw. He's a super-capable bad-ass with specialized gadgets and weapons at his disposal, including hockey pucks he can attached to other cars to control them. Shaw also has a team of henchmen identified as evil counterparts of Dom's crew. Evans can certainly handle being a ruthless baddie with a sinister sneer, despite the script providing him with little in the way of depth.

Not that character depth is what we watch these movies for. No, we sit down for a “Fast” movie because we want to see some gravity defying stunts. “Furious 6” certainly delivers in that regard. Shaw's coolest gadget is an armored dune-buggy designed to launch other cars into the air, which happens repeatedly. I really never get tired of seeing cars corkscrew through the air. Probably the movie's trademark sequence involves a tank being unleashed on a freeway. This is a sequence that only escalates in absurdity as it goes along. Countless cars are pancaked under the tank treads, a muscle car is slowly shredded, and the climax to the scene – involving Vin Diesel sailing through the air in slow-motion – is hysterical. As memorable as this particular sequence is, I'm glad the movie made room for some close quarters melees too. It would've been a waste to slot Carano and Joe Taslim in the cast and not having them do some fighting. Taslim's fight scene, which involves kicking Tyrese through multiple planes of glass, is probably the best.

Melodrama is nothing new to this particular franchise. “Furious 6” features that most hackneyed of soap opera plot devices: Amnesia. Letty is working with the bad guys, and was thought dead, because she has no memories of her past with Dom. This is a solid way to retcon Michelle Rodriguez's clumsy death in the previous movie, while also giving her a juicier character arc. This is far from the movie's only narrative contrivances. There's a lengthy subplot that drops Brian into prison, a long ways to go just to confirm a simple plot point. Because movies were still ripping off “The Dark Knight” at this point, the bad guy gets captured on-purpose as part of his master plan. I don't think a “Fast and the Furious” movie needs a story that takes this many detours is my point.

While its cast of characters are doubtlessly a benefit to this film, by the final act, I was losing track of where everyone was a little bit. The elaborate finale, which involves dragging a massive air bus to the ground, has each member of Dom's team sparing off with their own partner or adversary. So much is happening, with the film cutting back and forth between each confrontation, that you feel a bit overwhelmed. The obvious money-shots in these scenes, such as Vin and the Rock taking down a musclebound baddie together, get lost in the shuffle of so much happening.

Despite some serious flaws, “Fast & Furious 6” still places high in my personal ranking of this franchise. The action sequences are really fabulous, with the movie balancing genuinely impressive stunt work and amusingly absurd digital fakery. The cast is still fun to hang out with and the script provides a suitably intimidating adversary. I don't really ask for much more from these films than that. [7/10]

RECENT WATCHES: Fast Five (2011)

“Fast & Furious” ended on a cliffhanger, suggesting Universal was very confident in the retooled franchise. The film was another hit, paving the way for “Fast Five” two years later. This seems to be the point where public opinion on the series started to shift. The first four were dismissed by critics and divisive among action fans. They had passionate defenders but a large group derided the “Fast” films as dumb-ass shit for dumb-ass shitheads. “Fast Five,” however, successfully transformed this into a series that reveled in its own ridiculous awesomeness. This kind of beyond-the-beyond audacity – which recalled the over-the-top action classics of the eighties – quickly won over a lot of folks I trust, really getting my attention. 

After busting Dom out of prison, the Torettos and Brian relocate to Rio de Janeiro. In need of cash, they agree to a risky heist aboard a moving train. It quickly goes pear-shaped but after the gang makes off with an especially valuable car. Inside the vehicle is a chip containing all the financial information of Hernan Reyes, the most powerful drug lord in Brazil. After Mia announces she's pregnant with Brian's child, Dom decides they are going to steal Reyes' millions as one last job. A group of new and old faces are called in to assist such an ambitious heist. Meanwhile, DSS agent Luke Hobbs – believing the Toretto gang murdered several DEA agents – pursues the racers ruthlessly. With Reyes' men also on their trail, things quickly escalate. 

The fourth “Fast” movie moved the series in the direction of globe-trotting action extravaganza. The fifth entry presents a more unified vision for the franchise by literally bringing together the divergent casts from the previous films. Matt Schulze's Vince returns for the first time since the original. “Tokyo Drift's” Han becomes a major player, following his cameo in part four. Ludacris' Tej and Tyrese's Rome from “2 Fast 2 Furious” join the rest of the team. Even Gal Gadot's Gisele from the last one comes back. More familiar faces show-up during the mid-credits scene. When so many long-running series are happy to slam the reboot button, I'll admit that “Fast Five” embracing the history of the franchise is charming. 

If I knew nothing else about these movies going into it, I knew that it was all about one uniting theme: Family. This really comes to the forefront in this installment. Dom agrees to one last job precisely because he wants his little sister and in-coming nephew to be taken care of. Vince is immediately forgiven for any past transgression and accepted back into the group entirely because he's part of Torreto's found family. That idea is presumably why this installment brings back so many established characters, to emphasize that family isn't just about blood but about who you choose. As goofy as this premise is in execution – some of these folks have known each other for a few days – it can't help but play out as kind of sweet. Vin's big speech around barbecue and beer... It's cute, ya know? Makes it feel like you're hanging out with these misfits and goofballs too.

Of course, to go up against such a memorable group of characters, you need an especially colorful antagonist. The film found that in the form of Dwayne Johnson, pro-wrestler turned one of the biggest movie stars in the world. He plays Hobbs, a super-tough agent sent to hunt down our heroes. The role utilizes Johnson's best attributes. That would be his massive physical presence and his way with a trash-talking one-liner. Hobbs isn't only a mountain of a man, clearly capable of taking down any opponent he encounters. He's also a fast-talker, casually hurling insults and colorful turns-of-phrases at those around him. In other words, the Rock was exactly the kind of bigger-than-life character necessary to play an opposing force 

The movie is well aware of what the Rock's presence means too. One of the show-stopping set pieces is a melee between Johnson and Vin Diesel, which features both men getting tossed through multiple walls. That's one of my favorite action beats in the film and also one of its more grounded. This is, after all, a movie that begins with a car jack-knifing a bus and causing it to flip through the air several times. That's not the real opening set piece either. That would be a ludicrous – but not Ludicris, he shows up later – sequence involving a truck, a train, a bridge, and a slow-mo dive into a river. The movie never quite tops that moment but its finale, where a massive bank vault dragged behind a muscle car and weaponized, sure as hell tries. Most impressively, the movie uses more practical effects than you might think. That gives these ridiculous stunt sequences a lot more heft and weight, making them exactly the kind of crazy action filmmaking I'd admire.

Built around these over-the-top sequences of vehicular mayhem is a fairly standard heist movie. I think anybody familiar with the genre knows that the plan set in place early in the film will naturally go wrong. The movie wouldn't be telling us this information if it didn't plan on subverting it. What's most fun about heist pictures is watching a group of bandits with highly specialized skills working out a complex scheme to solve some convoluted problem. “Fast Five” provides us with just that, as Dom's gang perfects a number of technique and wacky schemes to break into the vault central to the story. A moment involving exploding toilets is especially amusing.

“Fast Five” really feels like it could've been the final installment in the series, leaving all of our misfit heroes in a comfortable place. Of course, things were really only beginning for this gang at this point. If I've been a little baffled by the massive popularity of these movies up to now, “Fast Five” is when it really started to click into place for me. It's big, loud, and dumb but I can't deny that I didn't enjoy myself the whole time. [7/10]

Director Report Card: James Wan (2010)

4. Insidious

With “Saw,” James Wan had launched the most popular horror franchise of the 2000s. His subsequent motion pictures had failed to duplicate that breakout success. By 2010, the “Saw” series had been bled dry by yearly sequels. Also clipping into the “Saw” installments' box office by this point was “Paranormal Activity,” a new horror franchise cranking out annual movies. Rather than try and beat 'em, Wan decided to join 'em. He teamed up with Oren Peli and Jason Blum, those responsible for the rival series, to create a new horror film. Concerned that the graphic gore of the “Saw” movies had convinced people he only made splatter flicks, Wan and Leigh Whannell's next collaboration would focus on the classical idea of a haunted house. Supposedly made for one and a half million dollars, “Insidious” would gross over one hundred times its budget at the box office. The film's success would further cement Blumhouse as the defining mainstream flavor of horror going into the new decade, launch a series of its own as well as numerous other haunting flicks with descriptive one-word titles, and proved that James Wan wasn't going away any time soon.

The Lambert family has a seemingly happy existence. Josh and Renai have recently moved into a wonderful new home, with their kid in tow: Oldest son Dalton, middle child Foster, and newborn baby Kali.. After an incident in the attic, Dalton falls into a coma that no doctor can explain. This proceeds increasingly frightening paranormal activity, seemingly targeting Renai. The family moves into a new home but the haunting only intensifies. Desperate, Josh and Renai bring in a team of psychic researchers. They believe Dalton has astral projected into an extra-dimensional realm called the Further, attracting the attention of malevolent spirits and a red-faced demon. Dalton is awoken by the team's efforts but the horror is far from over. He inherited his powers from his dad, Josh having a long history with these particular otherworldly entities. 

Wan and Whannell have spoken of their influences over the years, how “The Amityville Horror” and the case files of the Warrens scared the crap out of them as kids. You can see echoes of both of these in “Insidious.” As in “Amityville,” this is the story of a husband and wife with a couple of kids moving into a new house, only to be beset by supernatural terror. As in reality, parapsychologists appear to investigate. Another likely influence was “Poltergeist,” as both this film and that one have the family banding together when one of the children is “taken.” However,  “The Amityville Horror” was as much about the financial pressures that tear the family apart as the paranormal ones. While “Poltergeist” was a story of a family realizing the love they have for each other is more valuable than their Reagan era luxuries. Which raises the question: What is “Insidious” about? 

It's not about money, that much is clear. Renei is a stay-at-home mom, who writes songs in her spare time. Josh is a teacher, somehow able to take care of three kids, a wife, and a new house on that meager salary. When the otherworldly incidents become more than Renei can handle, she demands that the family moves into another house. Which they do, seemingly without any further financial burden being placed on them. We do see the two starting to argue as Dalton's condition remains unchanged and weird shit continues to happen, with Josh staying longer at work seemingly to avoid the problems at home. This amounts to all of one scene though. The couple otherwise seem happily married, loving all three of their kids. “Insidious” seems to resist the traditional subtext of the haunted house genre, in which the disturbance in the home is much more than spiritual.

In that case, what is “Insidious” about? The film's pithy tagline was “It's not the house that's haunted.” This is all but repeated in dialogue. Much as in Peli and Blum's “Paranormal Activity” franchise, it is a person that the unrestful spirits are attached to, not a structure. Josh's mom has photographs of the boy from his youth, a ghostly presence lurking in the background of each. He has totally suppressed and forgotten the childhood horror that apparently haunted him. Despite that, it has returned to infect his son, who is now more at risk than he ever was. When paired with the downbeat ending, “Insidious” becomes a story of how the past is never totally done with us. Josh may have buried his childhood trauma but it has been revived in his own son, much the way a genetic mental illness, the cycle of abuse, or alcoholism reoccurs throughout a family bloodline. 

Whether “Insidious” is knowingly invoking themes of childhood abuse or not, there's definitely one point the film seems to be making: The supernatural is real and only professional ghost hunters can help. Once medium Elise Rainier and her team of parapsychology researchers enter the film, “Insidious” uncritically embraces new age bullshit. Spirit photography is invoked. Rainer's sidekicks, Specs and Tucker, use all sorts of heat and energy detecting gizmos to determine something is amiss. Why they need to do this, when Elise is psychic and can receive visual impressions of these demonic spirits, I don't know. All of this climaxes with the script's embracing of astral projection as a literal fact. I love horror movies and I love folklore. I don't mind any number of goopy, New Age hooey being included in a horror film to build up its own story or ideas. However, considering “Insidious” is a test run for “The Conjuring” – a full-term reputation laundering for a pair of fraudsters and kooks – it's hard to perceive its embracing of ghost hunting hokum and astral plain nonsense as anything but a sincere endorsement. 

This reveals another problem with “Insidious.” It is, in fact, an extremely silly motion picture. James Wan and his team are adapt at the brass tacks techniques of engineering effective scares. The first half of the movie features multiple, quiet and still shots of the family in their home. This establishes a sense of place and, with it, a sense of normality. The mundane first act is devoted to Renei playing with Dalton and the other kids, the couple bonding, and other scenes of domestic tranquility. The film is establishing a “normal” world, one any of us can recognize, that will soon be disrupted and distorted by the horrors to come. Wan is good at this and “Insidious” is genuinely most effective in its earlier scenes, when the creeping sense that something is going to go very wrong, very soon is unavoidable. 

If “Insidious” was Wan's attempt to prove he didn't need the grisly violence of the “Saw” movies to scare an audience, it's a mixed showcase. On one hand, a decent attempt is made to build a creepy ambiance. The ghostly activity starts small, with an alarm going off or a shadowy figures spotted on the wall. Too often, however, these scenes pay off in the loudest and most obnoxious types of shrieking scares imaginable. This is most apparent in one of “Insidious'” trademark sequences. Barbara Hershey as Josh's mom – named Lorraine, another likely nod to the Warrens – relates a nightmare she had that further suggests the demonic spirit at the story's center. It's an effectively spooky moment that builds to a head in bright red and black face paint standing behind Patrick Wilson and roaring like a tiger. That's supposed to be a big scary moment but it comes off as thuddingly loud and rather goofy to me. 

Sadly, that is an omen of things to come. “Insidious” looses a lot of steam after the Lamberts move to a new home, all the work it did establishing a sense of location in the first hour going out the window. At that point, the ghosts stop messing around and start getting in people's faces. A boy dressed like a Dickensian ragamuffin leaps from a closest at Renei. In one utterly hilarious scene, little Dalton springs to life and starts throwing grown men around a room while a stringy-haired goth dude licks people's faces. In its last act, “Insidious” sends Patrick Wilson through a carnival-style house of horrors, the man walking from room to room as he encounters one ghostly tableau after another. All of these spectres utilize well-trotted visual clichés. There's a ghostly bride, people smiling ominously, and a demon with cloven hooves who sharpens his nails like Freddy Krueger. By far the most egregious miscalculation made is trying to mine an old song for post-modern creepiness. Wan chooses Tiny Tim's trilling, ukulele strumming weirdo novelty classic “Tiptoe Through the Tulips.” That's a song I associate with listening to Dr. Demento, not with otherworldly horrors.  

“Insidious” never blinks either, playing all of its goofy attempts at scares with utmost seriousness. The film only grows more humorless as it goes along, fully invested in its own dumb-ass mythology. Rather than simply calling its spirits ghosts or demons, the script quickly starts to throw around its own language. “The Further” is the term it cooks up for the extra-dimensional world its nasty spooks hang out in. When paired with multiple dead-serious monologues about the ominous and evil forces that nearly claimed Josh as a youth, and the powers of hypnosis, you get the feeling that Wan and Whannell thought they were writing the horror version of “Lord of the Rings” or something. Most long running horror series invent a fabulous mythology out of happenstance, the natural extension of running a simple idea out as long as you can. “Insidious” wants that right from the get-go and doesn't have the handling on modern folklore the way, say, “The Blair Witch Project” did.

Perhaps I'm overthinking all of it. James Wan set out to dispel the notion that he was only a gore guy. Obviously, “Insidious'” box office success and the subsequent decade of hits Wan has directed proved that again and again. However, “Insidious” actually has a lot more in common with Wan's breakout film than he'd probably like to admit. John R. Leonetti, his “Dead Silence” and “Death Sentence” cinematographer, returns to photograph this one. It continues the sickly green and washed-out grey color palette that characterizes Wan's work up to this point. In its last act, increasingly frantic camera movements – akin to the shock metal music video style editing that characterized “Saw” – put in a few token appearances. The bloody stumps and mangled bodies have been left behind but the same visual quirks are very much present.

“Insidious'” sense of self-seriousness is present in most of its performances. Patrick Wilson and Rose Bryne do fine in the early scenes, projecting enough warmth for you to buy them as loving parents and a happy couple. However, as the material grows more ridiculous, it becomes more difficult to recognize their behavior as those of human beings. Genre stalwart Lin Shaye appears as Elise and it's nice to see her with a bigger role. She's probably the most adapt member in the cast at making the script's pseudo-scientific trash believable. Leigh Whannell himself and Angus Sampson as her sidekicks contribute a little bit of comic relief, something the film desperately needed more of. 

With a score of skittering ambiance and shrieking strings from Joseph Bishara, “Insidious” set out to be a scary movie for a mass audience. It must have worked, considering the box office receipts and several sequels it generated. I suppose people flocked to the movie, threw their popcorn up into the air, squealed with delight at the jump scares, and left wanting to know more about its belabored backstory. There is technical skill on display in “Insidious” that I can admire. Wan and his teams know the notes to play but they don't seem to have a grip on – if you'll excuse the pun – the spirit of the thing. Not that the majority of people agree with me, as “Insidious” is widely accepted among many as a modern horror classic. I guess, by some measure, ghost movies are preferable to overly slick remakes, floppy found footage flicks, and same-y torture horror. I guess. [Grade: C+]

RECENT WATCHES: Saw 3D (2010)

"Saw VI" grossed only 69.8 million at the global box office. Still a healthy profit against its 11 million dollar budget but a considerable drop from prior films, part six remaining the lowest grossing non-pandemic era entry in the series. A few factors could be considered for why that is. Maybe part five kind of sucking had less people turning out for six. Maybe the yearly release schedule left the creative team burned out and audiences' appetite for gore finally satisfied. The sixth film was topped opening weekend by "Paranormal Activity 2," suggesting that a new horror franchise had stolen Jigsaw's title as the box office champ of Halloween. Whatever the reason, Twisted Pictures decided they better wrap it up while some sort of demand still existed. The release of "Avatar" the year before had officially kicked off the modern 3D fad, giving the franchise some other coat tails to ride. "Saw 3D" would launch traps and giblets at theater goers in 2010, the additional promise of being the concluding installment in the story giving it another gimmick to draw ticket buyers in. (Which was taken further when the film was released on flat DVDs under the hilariously presumptuous name of "Saw: The Final Chapter.") The tactic paid off, in terms of earnings, but few seemed to find this a satisfying end to the series. Like far too many horror hits, "Saw" seemed to be going out on a whimper and not a bang.

Jill, the widow of the late John Kramer, strapped unworthy apprentice Mark Hoffman into the reverse bear trap at the end of the last movie. The would-be Jigsaw survives and Jill turns herself in to the FBI, in hopes they can protect her. Now with nothing to lose, Hoffman goes on a roaring rampage of revenge, with Jill as his final target. He also takes aim at internal affairs agent Matt Gibson, an old colleague tasked with protecting Jill. Meanwhile, the games continue as Bobby Degan – who has falsely claimed to be a Jigsaw survivor to gain fame – is thrust into an actual series of traps, forced to try and rescue those that assisted his hoax from deadly contraptions.

Lionsgate had originally planned to split the so-called final "Saw" installment into two parts – another unfortunate cinematic fad of the time – before the mediocre box office for part six made them reduce it to one movie. This strikes me as odd, considering Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan's original master plan was supposedly a second trilogy spanning through the fourth, fifth, and sixth movies. Indeed, "Saw 3D" makes it clearer that this story could have easily wrapped up with Hoffman getting his head wrenched apart by the reverse bear trap. The only plot thread that truly remains to be resolved is Hoffman seeking revenge on Jill. This results in him stabbing his way through a police station, in a decidedly un-Jigsaw fashion. Once that plot anticlimactically wraps up, the film abruptly ends with the entrance of another character that barely misses qualifying as a deus ex machina. The sequel hastily introduces Agent Gibson to give Hoffman someone else to scheme against. I honestly wondered if this guy might have been an established personality from the previous films, given the "Saw's" series habit of expanding on minor characters from past movies. Nope, this is Agent Gibson's first and last appearance in the "Saw" universe, another guy Hoffman has a years long grudge against despite him never being mentioned before now. That subplot is also resolved bluntly and without much fanfare. 

All of "Saw 3D" reeks of this feeling, of simply wanting to be done with it. The formula – of a chosen asshole being forced to decide the fate of captured victims, running parallel to the Jigsaw soap opera– is maintained. However, the disconnect between Hoffman's storyline and Bobby Degan's trial comes across as massive. You never get the impression that Hoffman is particularly interested in this game nor does it have much effect on the rest of the plot. Truthfully, the scenario pushes "Saw" into preposterous territory. Some of the traps are so elaborate and big – such as a CGI brazen bull building itself around a woman – that you wonder how any one person could afford to build and assemble it by themselves. Much less a serial killer who is on the run from the law through the entire movie. If a "Saw" movie leaves you asking the question "Wait, when did he have the time and resources to set all that up?," something has gone seriously wrong.

The film is repeatedly pulled between this general lack of ideas and energy and a desire to be the biggest, craziest "Saw" yet. The results come across as more desperate to be intense and shocking than actually upsetting. An opening trap – of a woman descending towards her boyfriends fighting over a table saw – takes place in a public square, once again making you wonder how that was pulled off in-universe. Meanwhile, the sequence ends up feeling uncomfortably sexist. A group of Neo-Nazis suspended in and around a speeding car is similarly mean-spirited in its ferocity while seeming so elaborate as to strain believability. These complex gags of death stand in contrast to the actual "game" once it gets going, which consists mostly of people in contraptions that impale them on spikes. In other words, it sure felt like the "Saw" team had run out of good ideas for death machines that are creativity gruesome and feature the trademark ironic punishment element of Jigsaw's schemes. Which has been all but abandoned by this point, as you're never quite sure what point exactly the engineer is trying to prove here.

As the last dying gasp of "torture porn" as a popular subgenre, "Saw 3D" represents the supposed goal of the style being all but abandoned. The highly realistic gore effects, in service of pushing the horror genre to extreme new heights, have given way to more rubbery looking violence. This is exacerbated by the sequel being in 3D. Obviously, that leads to bladed devices being jabbed towards the viewer and bloody meat spurting through the air. Both such scenarios play out in a nightmare sequence, a totally gratuitous moment included simply to shove another murder scene into the film. Such a theatrical presentation inevitably bends towards camp. However, "Saw" would be remised if it didn't maintain its trademark mood of taking its own ridiculous bullshit with utmost seriousness. This creates a mean-spirited atmosphere, most evident in when we finally see the reverse bear trap work as intended. Shattered teeth and bloody threads of flesh are tossed at the viewer, a desperate attempt to shock or impress that comes off as feeling more than a little sweaty. 

A better movie would embrace this undercurrent of humor. Honestly, I almost wonder if "Saw 3D" was trying to do that. The idea of a support group for survivors of Jigsaw's deadly games, that there are enough of them now to support such a venture, feels like an especially dark "Saturday Night Live" sketch. The scenes devoted to this set-up almost move towards comedy, as the past victims debate whether Jigsaw was a monster or a genius who saved their lives. The answer to that question seems self-evident but "Saw 3D" seems to have unironically embraced the idea of John Kramer as some sort of well-intentioned cult leader. So totally bereft of ideas, Dunstan and Melton incorporated an extremely popular fan theory of the time into "Saw 3D," that a character unseen since part one is not only still alive but willingly became another of Jigsaw's apprentices. I like Tobin Bell too but playing Kramer as this irresistibly magnetic, quasi-cult leader who brainwashes people into following his inconsistent philosophy – which the sequel presents as better than Hoffman's revenge driven methods – is baffling. John Kramer sure did a lot of revenge too! It's a twist that makes no sense, moving towards an ending that is nothing but an act of shallow fan service. 

That is ultimately all "Saw 3D" has to offer. Having exhausted all other ideas, the sequel represents the series spiraling towards a hashed together resolution of its own melodramas and a couple of attempts to goose the audience with familiar faces or bloody special effects. I definitely recall at least a few "Saw"-heads loving that final twist at the time. Unless you are thoroughly invested in the series' mythology, you're unlikely to get much out of the film. Greutert and his team trot out the same old visual quirks and musical cues but any effect they once had has long since worn out. "Saw VI" showed that incorporating some social satire and more chances for Bell to ham it up could've kept this series rolling for a while. Instead, "Saw 3D" has the horror franchise chasing its own tail on the way to a thoroughly underwhelming ending. After seven years, it was time to wrap the game up. [4/10]

RECENT WATCHES: Saw VI (2009)

The common wisdom is that the first entry in a long-running horror series is some sort of critically acclaimed genre classic while the endless sequels were increasingly derided by the mainstream press as nothing but senseless gore. This is sometimes true but I was actively reading a lot of critics in the 2000s and recall the original "Saw" as being considered pretty dumb by most professionals even then. Once the moral panic around "torture porn" kicked in, the yearly "Saw" sequels became an excuse for writers to clutch their pearls and search their thesaurus for as many synonyms for "mindless drivel" as they could find. That was certainly the case by the time we got to "Saw VI," which Liongates did not bother to screen for critics. However, to considerably surprise, the sixth film actually received some better notices than the previous sequels by incorporating some social commentary into its explicit violence. The installment is also beloved by fans, with many considering it a late-in-the-series highlight for a franchise that was terribly close to being totally wrung out by this point.

With the FBI agent on his tail dispatched, Mark Hoffman has officially established himself as the successor to the mantle of the Jigsaw Killer. He tries and frames his dead nemesis for his crimes while harassing John Kramer's widow, Jill, for hints about the latest game. Director Erickson and Agent Perez – who survived her encounter with an exploding Billy the Puppet doll in part four – are quickly putting the pieces together about Hoffman's deception. Meanwhile, Jigsaw's most elaborate game is getting underway. William Easton, the health insurance executive who denied John's policy, awakens in a labyrinth. His colleagues are strung up in fatal devices that will force Easton to confront the life and death decisions he makes every day up close, as he moves towards rescuing his family in the maze's center.

As I remember it, horror fans were very receptive to the annual tradition of new "Saw" movies. I seem to recall posters on the Bloody Disgusting and MovieManiac.net forums enthusiastically accepting Hoffman as the new Jigsaw. This is funny as the sequels themselves increasingly seem to regard him as unworthy of this legacy. Maybe the clear gulf in charisma between Tobin Bell and Costas Mandylor was more evident to the producers. Either way, "Saw VI" agrees that Mark Hoffman sucks. While John Kramer kept the authorities fumbling around in the dark for years, Hoffman seems to have screwed up by the start of his second "game." Rather than attempting to teach people the value of their own lives and push their will to survive to the limit, Hoffman acts more directly as a vigilante punishing criminals. More pressingly, Hoffman is using the Jigsaw identity to destroy his enemies, get revenge, and get himself promoted at work. Incoherent and contradictory as his philosophy was, John Kramer was a fanatic with a mission and a point to make. Hoffman is a self-interested bully, a power-hungry supervillain, and kind of an idiot who has given himself a lofty, unearned sense of superiority. 

Saying this engineer of sadistic torment machines is morally sounder than this other torture master is ridiculous, of course. While the initial hook of the "Saw" series was that Jigsaw's justification for his crimes were unreasonable, the sequels have aligned himself more and more with his twisted mission. Now, in this pitch black moral universe, we are rooting for one serial killer to fail to confirm himself as the heir to another serial killer's title. I have to wonder if this isn't Kevin Greutert – promoted from editor to director – making some sort of commentary on the different audiences for these movies. Is he comparing the gore hounds who show up every October merely to see more elaborate methods of mutilation to Hoffman, who uses Jigsaw's games for selfish or petty purposes? As opposed to those that actually engage with the twisted lessons John Kramer was trying to teach his victims? Horror villains becoming fan favorites is basically impossible to avoid but Jigsaw becoming an antihero this admired suggest somebody's wires got crossed along the way. Or maybe this is Twisted Pictures throwing shade at the other "torture porn" films that imitated "Saw" and deeming them unworthy. Whatever the purpose, "Saw VI" is clearly distinguishing one type of bloody maiming as holier than the other. 

Whether this was intentional or not is debatable but "Saw VI" clearly does have weightier ideas on its mind. The sequel came out five months before President Obama signed the Affordable Healthcare Act into law, prompting unfounded fear mongering from the right-wing noise machine and endless debate about how healthcare is distributed in America. A humble horror sequel has no deep reflections on this but clearly communicates one message: Health insurance workers are fucking assholes. Jigsaw turns his wrath on the executives and pencil pushers who cynically decide who lives and who dies, forcing them into grisly challenges as a metaphor for their own corporate greed and lack of empathy. Literally, as Jigsaw has Easton decided whether a healthy young man with no family is more worthy of life than a woman with pre-existing conditions and several kids. In this current era, where Luigi Manigone can become a folk hero overnight for capping the CEO of UnitedHealthcate, it's not hard to be on Jigsaw's side here. The sequel's most stirring moment isn't any of its brutal gore sequences. Instead, it's when Tobin Bell goes on a fiery rant about the callousness of insurance companies, ending by directly comparing them to predatory fish. 

Taking target at the kind of real life villains that probably do deserve some torturous lessons in humanity brings something back to the "Saw" series that hasn't been present since the second film. There's a kind of joyful ridiculousness to the grim traps that are thought up this. A Billy the Puppet doll swings towards a glass window, as if the protagonist is venturing through a jump scare filled haunted attraction. The central set piece of the film involves people tied to a rotating platform with a shotgun pointed at it, a very silly set-up that actively invites the comparison to a carnival spectacle. While the traps in the last two movies could get a little too conceptual at times, Greutert cuts the scenarios down here. Having to chop off a literal pound of flesh or navigate a corridor full of spewing steam are straight forward enough concepts. The climatic murder device is so over-the-top that it pushes "Saw," for the first time, almost into the realm of campy gore comedy. It's not only CEOs and insurance agents that are punished here but also some predatory lenders and a gossip magazine columnist, all played as thoroughly despicable characters by leaning on overwrought emotion. 

Not that this was an intentional move on "Saw VI's" behalf. As always, these movies take themselves very serious. The degree of continuity between sequels and the number of past events to keep track of remain dense. Whenever "Saw VI" focuses on Jill trying to fulfill her husband's twisted plans or Hoffman's manipulative tactics, we've definitely reached soap opera territory. The level of melodrama, when added to the grim subject matter, does result in the first decent twist ending in a while and a finale that puts a novel spin on one of the classic "Saw" gimmicks. Greutert sticks to the hyper-grim visual palette that has been long established by now. Admittedly, the spastic montages and dingy lighting aren't utilized quite as much, these visual clichés starting to fall out of popularity by 2009. 

Honestly, one has to wonder if Lionsgate and Twisted Pictures themselves weren't aware of how silly this series was starting to get. Before "Saw VI" went before cameras, there was an accompanying VH1 reality show entitled "Scream Queens," in which the winner got to be a special guest victim in the sequel. Competing to be graphically tortured in a horror movie strikes me as a weird premise for a game show but I guess that was the state of both the horror and reality TV genres at the time. (The winner, by the way, was Tanedra Howard, who does a decent job of hacking her own arm off in the opening trap.) Whether "Saw VI" knowingly started to embrace the overly edgy element of the series for humor or at least incorporate a tiny bit of social relevance, it did inject some energy into a horror series that was starting to run its course. [7/10]