The Game Continues… Unfortunately
If Saw were a dinner party, then Saw V would be that guest who shows up late, brings nothing, and spends the evening retelling the same stories everyone’s already heard — only slower and with less charisma.
Directed by David Hackl in his debut (and mercifully, his only entry as director), Saw V is the cinematic equivalent of an elaborate trap designed to test your patience rather than your moral fiber. The premise, once razor-sharp and sadistically poetic, has been dulled down to a wet butter knife scraping at the walls of franchise exhaustion.
By the fifth film, the once-terrifying Jigsaw killer is less a criminal mastermind and more of a motivational speaker for bad decision-making. The only puzzle here is how the film managed to cost $10 million more than its plot was worth.
Plot? Kind Of.
The story — and I use that term generously — picks up where Saw IV left off: with FBI Agent Peter Strahm (Scott Patterson) gasping for air, trapped, and confused. That’s also how most audiences felt within ten minutes.
Strahm, having survived a water box trap by giving himself a tracheotomy with a pen (the most heroic use of office supplies since The Office), becomes obsessed with uncovering Jigsaw’s accomplice. Meanwhile, said accomplice, Detective Mark Hoffman (Costas Mandylor), strolls around acting suspiciously sweaty and unconvincing.
Hoffman’s whole cover story hinges on everyone around him being both blind and brain-dead — which, judging by the film’s FBI agents, is exactly the case. He’s promoted for his “bravery,” while Strahm, looking like a man who’s been awake since Saw II, goes rogue and starts unraveling the plot.
Meanwhile, in what feels like a side quest from another movie entirely, five strangers wake up in a sewer full of murder traps. They’re told to “work together” by a creepy tape, but because they all went to the “Every Man for Himself” school of horror logic, they start dropping faster than Lionsgate’s stock value circa 2008.
Their deaths are spectacularly stupid — one gets decapitated because she can’t figure out how glass works, another explodes because teamwork is apparently optional, and one guy gets electrocuted by a bathtub full of corpse. It’s The Breakfast Club, if detention involved industrial saws and a total lack of character development.
Meet the Villains (and Everyone Who Thinks They’re Smarter Than They Are)
Let’s talk about Detective Hoffman, the franchise’s least subtle murderer since Jigsaw himself coughed blood over half the evidence in Saw III.
Costas Mandylor plays Hoffman with the emotional range of a damp gym towel. He scowls, he grunts, he sweats — all while trying to convince the world that he isn’t clearly the guy murdering everyone. His version of “stealth” is about as convincing as a clown at a funeral.
Then there’s Strahm, our supposed hero. He spends the entire movie breathing heavily, yelling at voice recorders, and muttering, “It’s Hoffman!” like a man trying to summon a ghost. His detective skills consist mostly of flashbacks, staring at walls, and ignoring all warnings to “enter the box.”
And speaking of boxes — Saw V features one of the franchise’s most unintentionally hilarious moments: Strahm’s death. After ambushing Hoffman, Strahm refuses to listen to a tape explicitly telling him to hide in a big, glass box. Naturally, the walls close in, and he gets crushed into a chunky red paste while Hoffman looks on smugly from inside said box.
This might have worked as a metaphor for poetic irony — except it mostly plays like an IKEA commercial gone wrong.
The Flashback Within a Flashback (Within Another Flashback)
If you thought Christopher Nolan’s Inception had layers, you’ve clearly never seen Saw V, where half the runtime is spent revisiting Saw IV, Saw III, and occasionally Saw II in blurry sepia tones.
The movie constantly cuts back to things we already know — as if the writers feared we’d forgotten the last four movies or the fact that Jigsaw has been dead since 2006.
It’s like the film is haunted by its own franchise.
Every time Tobin Bell’s corpse appears in another “previously recorded” message, it feels less like a clever continuity trick and more like Weekend at Bernie’s: Torture Porn Edition. You start to pity Bell — a brilliant actor now forced to deliver fortune-cookie wisdom like, “The choices you make define who you are,” while wearing 12 pounds of fake blood.
By the end, it’s not scary — it’s sad. You half expect a post-credits scene where Jigsaw’s ghost applies for unemployment.
The Traps: OSHA Violations Galore
The Saw franchise built its reputation on traps that were both creative and nightmarishly poetic. Saw V builds its traps like they were designed during lunch breaks.
You’ve got your pendulum trap (which kills a guy even though he follows the rules), a bunch of collars with razor blades (because why not), and a finale that requires two survivors to donate ten pints of blood.
Now, ten pints is roughly the amount of blood in two people, meaning they literally have to bleed themselves to near death to open a door — because subtlety was clearly removed with a bone saw sometime around Saw III.
The twist? The traps could’ve been solved if everyone had worked together. Which would’ve been a neat moral lesson if anyone had an IQ higher than room temperature. Instead, everyone dies horribly, proving once again that Jigsaw’s real legacy isn’t morality — it’s Darwinism.
The Direction: A Trap of Its Own
Director David Hackl’s greatest achievement here is proving that even chaos can be boring. Everything is drenched in that signature Saw greenish-brown sludge filter, making every scene look like it’s been filmed through a bottle of flat Mountain Dew.
The editing, once rapid and kinetic, now feels like a caffeine withdrawal montage. Every trap, flashback, and plot twist is chopped into confetti and tossed onto the audience like sadistic glitter.
Hackl treats suspense the way a cat treats a glass on a counter: he just knocks it off for fun.
The Moral Philosophy of a Madman Who’s Been Dead for Two Movies
By Saw V, Jigsaw’s moral philosophy has gone from “teaching people to value life” to “randomly murdering anyone who makes a poor life choice.”
Seth Baxter’s opening trap — the pendulum — is a perfect example. Jigsaw’s rules? Smash your hands, get to live. Except he smashes his hands and still dies. So, what was the lesson here? “Never trust a posthumous psychopath”?
The film wants to be deep. It wants to be about justice, guilt, and moral reckoning. But by this point, it’s just a confused mess of revenge porn wrapped in a philosophy major’s freshman essay.
If Jigsaw’s message were a TED Talk, it would be titled “How to Hold Grudges and Build Murder Contraptions on a Budget.”
The Ending: Flattened Expectations
When Strahm gets crushed between two walls in the film’s grand finale, it’s hard not to sympathize. That’s exactly how every audience member feels after 92 minutes of this nonsense — slowly compressed by the weight of recycled ideas and incoherent plotting.
The movie tries to end on a shocking reveal, but there’s nothing left to reveal. The twist isn’t clever — it’s contractual obligation. Hoffman lives. Strahm dies. The audience dies inside.
Final Verdict: Game Over (Please, For Real This Time)
Saw V isn’t a horror film. It’s a franchise hostage situation.
There are no scares, no clever puzzles, no emotional stakes — just a conveyor belt of confusion and carnage. It’s what happens when a once-great idea refuses to die, much like its own antagonist.
If Jigsaw were alive to see this mess, even he’d say, “You know what? Maybe I went too far.”
Rating: 1 out of 5 crushed skulls.
Because the only real trap here is thinking this series still had anything left to say
