Parents' Guide to Saw V

The first Saw film, while hardly brilliant, had a certain grim giddy glee to its inventive murders and terrible tortures; Saw V is worn down and weary under a numbing burden of repetition. The Saw series has become a staple of modern horror, but the fact is that series creators James Wan and Leigh Wannell moved on after Saw III; the Saw movies are now mass-production commodities, and the machinery seems to be lubricated with blood. Saw V flashes back to the earlier Saw films and shows audiences new twists on what has gone before; the assumption that we'll be interested is a fairly presumptuous one on the part of the filmmakers. The acting is at a soap-opera level; the biggest star in the film is Bell (whose Jigsaw may have died in the last movie but gets a surprising amount of screen time nonetheless thanks to all the flashbacks). And the whole film is shot by director David Hackl with a smeary, cheap look, as if the camera lens were behind a thin film of bacon fat or soot.

The film sets up Saw VI, of course, but it also takes the time to show us plenty of horrible violence -- decapitation, self-mutilation, bone-grinding pressure, eviscerating blades -- carried out by deathtrap "games" that the killer uses as objects of moral instruction. Screenwriters Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan clearly devoted more thought to crafting and developing these games than they did to crafting and developing the characters trapped in them.