![]() Why Mexico? It all has to happen in secret, he’s told, because big pharma, its chemo profits threatened, wants to shut the treatment down. Kramer flies down to Mexico to receive the special treatment. ![]() But then a member of his cancer-patient support group tips him to a Norwegian physician who is working on a treatment that involves surgery and an experimental drug cocktail. Kramer has been given a prognosis of just months to live. He’s making you suffer, but only to free your soul. Bell is 81 now, and in “Saw X” he’s like Clint Eastwood crossed with Father Merrin from “The Exorcist.” Kramer is like a grizzled sheriff who has come to exorcise your demons. And John Kramer, who is now suffering from terminal brain cancer, is so front and center that Tobin Bell has never given such a full-scale performance as the human behind Jigsaw. It lends the plot and locale an organic unity. You could see that as good thing or a not so good thing. ![]() They came up with a solution that, in theory, sounds good: “ Saw X,” the 10th entry in the now two-decade-old series, comes closer than most of the “Saw” films to being an actual movie. (Its $23 million domestic gross was a series low.) So the gurus of the franchise got together and made a clear decision that something had to be done to inject new lifeblood into the wheezy old contraption. The last “Saw” film, “Spiral” (2021), saw the series running on fumes, creatively and at the box office. You might say that we’re giving ourselves the entertainment we deserve. We’re making the choice to watch this insane sadistic pulp and experience it as a kick. A “Saw” movie is structured so that we identity with the victims the shuddery thrill is in sitting there thinking, “Thank God it’s not me! (although it could be).” Yet by watching a “Saw” movie, we too subject ourselves to a kind of (vicarious) torture. (Choose to have your fingers pulled out of their sockets…or die.) It’s an idea that links up to what’s going on in the audience. Jigsaw ( Tobin Bell), is that he isn’t actually killing anyone. ![]() The most interesting idea in the “Saw” films, stated over and over by that wizened high priest of sick violence John Kramer, a.k.a. The whole concept of sin, articulated this heavily, is more than a little corny (that’s one reason I think the seven-deadly-sins premise of David Fincher’s “Se7en” is that film’s most rickety dimension, rather than its most dramatic), but there’s no denying that in the “Saw” movies the concept serves a canny purpose. Each victim, strapped into his or her loopy-ingenious electro-medieval Rube Goldberg slicer-dicer-chopper-gouger, is being put through the agonies of the damned only because of some sin that he or she committed in the real world. The “ Saw” films have always been rightfully tagged as torture porn, but they come on as flesh-ripping morality plays. ![]()
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