Saw V

As best I could tell: Jigsaw has been dead for a couple of entries, living on via video snippets. He’s picking up surrogates along the way to continue his nefarious game of inducing self-destructive folks to get a taste of how precious life is by kidnapping them, rigging them to some absurdly Rube Goldberg mousetrap and forcing them to make some pain-of-death choice before things get very Grand Guignol on their asses. These folks rarely make the right choices, because that’s really not part of the implicit bargain between filmmaker and viewer, now is it? This time around, a cop staggers out of the slaughterhouse to continue on as Jigsaw’s latest acolyte. A federal agent suspects what’s going on and the cop knows that the fed suspects. As the cat ’n’ mouse is played out between the two, the latest batch of strangers is locked down in a dank basement together to play the latest round. And again, the clock begins to tick. To be fair, it is what it is. If you want blood, Saw V has it. Feather River Cinemas and Tinseltown. Rated R