Saw IV

When you don’t care about the victims, how do you care about them being tortured? The fourth installment of what started out as a promising horror franchise does what many other horror franchises do: it revives the dead. In this case, however, while Jigsaw (Tobin Bell), the evil mastermind testing people’s will to live, remains dead and gone, it’s his work that lives on. During Jigsaw’s autopsy, which opens the film quite graphically, a message is found for the homicide detectives. It appears he’s also left behind a slew of intricate death machines, complete with tape or video messages. The rest of the film concerns itself with the detectives tracking down Jigsaw’s accomplice. Meanwhile, one of the detectives from the earlier films, Rigg (Lyriq Bent), is faced with a laundry list of Jigsaw’s tests that he must pass in order to save a colleague who has been missing six months. It’s all quite silly, really. True to the franchise’s M.O., there’s a shocking twist of an ending, but by the time you get that far, you’ve likely stopped caring.