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The Rube Goldberg Of Serial Killers | Tobin Bell’s character is dead, but that doesn’t stop him from appearing in all sorts of scary, scary flashbacks in Saw V.

Saw V

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SAW V
Directed by David Hackl. Starring Costas Mandylor, Scott Patterson, Tobin Bell. Now playing.
*1/2

Unlike the more famous horror franchises in film history, such as Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street, you can at least credit the ever-expanding Saw series for maintaining a certain degree of continuity. Ever since Saw II started the chain of annual sequels in 2005, each new edition has valiantly attempted to tie the plot into the movie that preceded it, if not all the way back to the original film. It was the technique of Darren Lynn Bousman (director of Saws II through IV) to use flashbacks and non-linear storylines to give new information on the motivations and techniques of the Jigsaw Killer (Tobin Bell), including how he somehow keeps getting people to carry on his “legacy.”

Directing Saw V is David Hackl, who is quite content to recycle Bousman’s plot devices. This means that the film starts where the previous one ends, and frequently jumps back in time to show Detective Mark Hoffman (Costas Mandylor) being involved with crucial plot points in all of the sequels. The plausibility that there remain any new details about Jigsaw to uncover is questionable (especially since the guy died in Saw III) but he conveniently manages to play a pivotal role in Hoffman’s newly revealed narrative.

The script by Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan tries to offer fresh insight into why Jigsaw does what he does, but considering that his expository line “I have never killed anyone, I always give people a chance” never changes from film to film, how could we expect to learn anything new? He thinks life is worth losing a limb for — how mysterious and sinister. And the persistent discussion of the Jigsaw philosophy does little more than eat up screen time that could be devoted to the inventive torture devices that audiences are more likely paying to see. In fact, the five people in Saw V who are trapped in one of Jigsaw’s games are seen so sporadically and have so little to do with the main plot that it’s easy to forget about them altogether.

So much of the story not told in flashbacks is devoted to the investigation of FBI Special Agent Strahm (Scott Patterson) that instead of being a horror movie that’s not scary, Saw V becomes a detective thriller that’s not thrilling. Everything that Strahm discovers, the audience more or less knows already, so the movie slowly ticks away instead of building to a climax. It’s a shame the script isn’t better developed, since it clearly wants to be more of a psychoanalysis of Jigsaw than a horror movie, and a mid-franchise genre shift would be much more surprising than any of the revelations Saw V has to offer.

But perhaps I’ve underestimated Hackl’s intentions; maybe the real horror in the Saw series is psychological. After all, the inevitable laughable twist at the end leaves the door open for yet another sequel, and the thought of still more Saw sequels popping up every Halloween is probably the scariest thing of all.