Saw 3D – Film Review

Jigsaw’s (Tobin Bell) widow Jill Tuck (Betsy Russell) attempts to assassinate Mark Hoffman (Costas Mandylor), a psychotic detective. He, however, escapes and threatens to kill her. She meets with detective Matt Gibson (Chad Donella) and demands protection.

After six movies, we have finally made it to the seventh and the then final installment in the Saw franchise with 3D, better known as The Final Chapter. It’s been quite the journey going through and watching all of these movies, for better or for worse. They have all been rather terrible except for the original, the third, and the fourth, but I have to admit that it’s been quite a fun ride binging through this entire series, even if they’re not really all that good.

Going into The Final Chapter, I wasn’t really sure what to think. For one, the title is just a straight-up lie considering the fact that this film had a sequel seven years down the road, Jigsaw, which I reviewed back when it was released theatrically. Also, in the circle of the Saw community, almost everybody regards this as the absolute worst in the franchise, so I was genuinely holding out hope that I was going to get a kick out of this seventh chapter. Sadly though, I didn’t. The Saw fanbase was right – The Final Chapter is absolutely the worst in the entire franchise and is a chore to even finish.

Gratefully, it’s only ninety-minutes in length including credits but even still, it feels significantly longer than it really is. It’s more of the same things we have seen in every other entry in the series except worse. The traps are back and more unimaginative than ever before and the story, which should come as a surprise to nobody, is even more dull and uninteresting.

We follow Mark Hoffman, who has essentially served as the new Jigsaw Killer for the past few films as he sets up torture chambers for his various victims and we watch him get pleasure out of seeing these people die and it’s basically the whole movie. Not a whole lot happens in the film and I can’t begin to imagine how disappointed die-hard fans of the series must have felt while walking out of the theatre.

I never spoil movie endings in any of my reviews and I’m not going to change that here, but all I’m going to say is that The Final Chapter contains an ending that is so incredibly disrespectful to the original film that it honestly blew me away, but not in the way that the filmmakers had intended. If you’re like me and you really loved the original Saw, prepare to like that film a little bit less after watching the ending of this one. They take characters that we know and love and do things with them that are extremely pointless and offensive to fans of the first.

Saw: The Final Chapter really has it all in terms of bad things on display. It brings back the awful acting, the headache-inducing editing, and disgusting camerawork of the past couple of installments but this time, it feels worse than before. It’s honestly hard to describe exactly how bad and massively underwhelming this seventh outing truly is. I’m not a gigantic fan of this series by any means, but even still, I was left colossally disappointed by this movie. At least we got Jigsaw seven years down the road. That’s not a great movie either, but at least it was fun and decently-directed. The Final Chapter was not.