Movie Review--Saw VI

"Do you like how brutality feels, Mark?"
--Jigsaw, Saw VI

"These politicians, they say the same thing over and over and over again.  'Healthcare decisions should be made by doctors and their patients, not by the government.'  Well, now I know they're not made by doctors and their patients or by the government.  They're made by the fucking insurance companies."
--John Kramer (Jigsaw), Saw VI


Only last week did the release date of Jigsaw come and pass!  As such, it's time for me to finish reviewing the remaining entries in the Saw series so I can review the newest sequel.  The only ones remaining are Saw VI and Saw: The Final Chapter (now an amusingly misleading title), and Saw VI establishes itself as one of the best offerings in the franchise in terms of story payoff, interconnectivity with the other movies, and production values.  Particularly unique is the way that it targets a specific industry.  With that, I'll start dissecting in the usual categories!


Production Values

As with Saw III (the last one I reviewed before this), this entry is vastly superior to the first movie in terms of its production values.  The acting, sets, and script tower about those of the original film, the end result looking and sounding great.  The main victim of the games, insurance company leader William Easton, is acted realistically by Peter Outerbridge, one of the only characters in the movie who seemingly comes to understand why he is being tested.  Costas Mandylor acts his character with malevolent but focused energy.  Mandylor's performance helps affirm yet again Hoffman's sociopathy (or possibly psychopathy?), reflected by his more monotone personality and reactions, his sociopathy a characteristic that Jigsaw himself, ironically, reprimands Hoffman for in one scene.  Tobin Bell, as fans might expect, is glorious, appearing to great effect in a handful of flashbacks that show him explaining his paradoxical philosophy.  Unfortunately this was the last movie to utilize him to this degree--before Jigsaw, which I have seen (and love) but will not review until I finish reviewing the other movies before it.

There are some fantastic scenes in Saw VI, like John's flashback meeting with William, a flashback to John and Hoffman and Amanda interacting before the events of Saw III, the carousel trap (with application analysts bickering over accusations and claims about who should survive), and the Seth Baxter tape decryption scene.  Practically every scene is useful to the story in some way.  And the acting and aesthetics provide a much more immersive atmosphere and than that of the original Saw, complete with impressive worldbuilding.  The connections to other Saw movies are deep and continue the series tradition of revealing that earlier events had far greater complexity than initial appearances suggested.


Story

(SPOILERS BELOW)

A rather focused and revenue-oriented businessman named William Easton presides over an insurance company, a group ruthless in its quest to minimize insurance risks.  His organization boasts a team of men and women who analyze insurance requests and search cautiously for any condition on the part of the applicants that might render them an immediate or future liability.  John Kramer, otherwise known as Jigsaw, though dead, had targeted the group years before but had waited to enact a game with its employees.

Detective Mark Hoffman survived his brawl with Agent Strahm in the last film.  Despite still working with the police, Hoffman still has anonymity--but Strahm's partner Lindsey Perez, who suffered a nail bomb to her face in Saw VI, reveals to Hoffman that she survived.  Hoffman has used the severed hand of Strahm, whom he had just recently killed, to place Strahm's fingerprints in an incriminating manner at various locations, including the site of a new game.

Strahm is thus framed for the main traps of Saw V.  But the FBI discover that the victims from the last movie had their jigsaw skin pieces cut out with a different knife than the kind John Kramer used (John always cut out jigsaw-shaped pieces of skin from victims who failed to survive), and the only other person who had this type of knife used on him was Seth Baxter, the murderer of Hoffman's sister (whom Hoffman killed with an inescapable trap designed to mimic Jigsaw's modus operandi before Jigsaw recruited him).  They set to work decrypting the tape for Seth Baxter in an attempt to see if a different person made the tape and cut out the skin piece.

Hoffman visits Jill Tuck, Kramer's former wife, and tells her that a planned game begins preemptively that night.  He also forcefully insists that he controls all aspects of the games from that point onward.  Soon after, William is abducted and awakes in a trap alongside his janitor where the one who expends a certain amount of oxygen will have his ribs crushed.

John Kramer's tapes for William show his face, not the Billy Puppet or a mask; Jigsaw wants William to see the identity of the person he almost destroyed.  In the past the two had met.  John came to William requesting coverage after he learned of his cancer, yet William denied him this.  In doing so he received John's indignation.  Furious, John could not understand why his equation to determine insurance coverage would ignore the will to live, the most important factor in human survival (according to John)--for no one can know his or her true will to live until faced with death.

William completes traps by making decisions that affect whether or not one individual or another will survive, culminating in a carousel with his six policy analysts strapped onto it.  Each will die unless he chooses to spare them, but he can only spare two, just as his policy analysts rejected two-thirds of all coverage requests.  This was intended to highlight the absurdity of his equation.

Meanwhile, Perez tells Hoffman that the voice on the Baxter tape is distorted but not the voice of John Kramer.  The FBI decrypt the tape voice and identify it as Hoffman's while he stands in the room, and he kills them all to protect his identity as the Jigsaw successor.  Hoffman places more of Strahm's fingerprints using his severed hand and then sets the room on fire, while William is killed by another player who could either terminate or spare him.

A box given to Jill because of John's will contains an updated reverse bear trap for Hoffman to be tested with; Jill subdues him, ties him in a chair, and activates the trap without providing a key.  He has a 45 second timer on his trap and breaks a hand by hitting it with the device, slips it out from the restraint, and then frees the other hand (I doubt he could do that with a broken hand easily . . .) before stopping the reverse bear trap from fully opening by getting the two halves attached to his jaw jammed between horizontal bars.  Hoffman lives, ready to hunt Jill.


Intellectual Content

The movie consistently targets a particular group: health insurance companies that prey on the unfortunate.  John sternly complains about how politicians insist that healthcare decisions be made by doctors and their patients, but he insists that doctors, their patients, and the government don't actually make them--insurance companies do via policies that can become practically murderous.  Health insurance is obtained when someone makes payments to an insurance company in exchange for some degree of financial coverage in the case of an expensive health problem or medical procedure, like a surgery.  If coverage is given, the insurance company will grant financial support exceeding what the one who received the coverage has paid.  Health insurance companies, by the nature of the business, would get the most financial security from giving coverage to people without a high risk of sickness, for they would be choosing to cover people who have a far lower probability of developing some condition or requiring some medical operation.

Jigsaw disapproves.  Strongly.  Speaking with William at a social gathering before the main events of the movie, he hears about William's insurance probability formula, saying that the formula ignores the human will to survive: the most important factor in a person's survival.  From the beginning William's tests are intended to exemplify the flawed nature of this probability formula.  One of the traps that most highlights this is the carousel trap, where Easton has to choose to free two of his six policy application analysts who reviewed all requests for coverage and deny two thirds of all applications--it's also the longest trap scene in any Saw film that I can think of.

At one point a character, a man denied healthcare coverage by Easton's company, labels the "protagonist" William (there are few true protagonists in the Saw universe) a criminal for disregarding his insurance policy because of a small past surgery that may have led to conditions that may have produced heart disease.  He had made insurance payments for a decade only to have his insurance denied when he developed a heart disease because of a surgery to remove a cyst from his jaw which left a scar that may have led to the heart disease he was let go for.

In another scene William watches a news broadcast on a television in his office that reports the death of John Kramer, otherwise known as the serial killer Jigsaw.  I found the irony very intriguing.  By having William view the broadcast on Jigsaw from the comfort of his office, in the presence of others like him in his selfish insurance agency, were the film's creators trying to imply that those who deny or revoke health care coverage are like serial killers?  "It's a business!  My decisions aren't made this way!", William tells two people in a trap as he is forced to choose to allow one to die, unless he is content to let both die instead.  In his tests he comes to stare into the core of his formula and perceive it as the vile thing Jigsaw sees it as.  A recorded message from a Billy Puppet summarizes what Jigsaw aimed to teach him: "As you can see, the choice is not so clear when you are face to face with the people whose blood will stain your hands."

Jigsaw, as one might expect, remains enigmatic and consistent in his inconsistency.  John criticizes Hoffman in a flashback for carelessly dumping the body of a future contestant from the third movie, protesting that the person Hoffman just callously treated is "a human being."  As usual, his philosophy and ethical system are both paradoxical and contradictory.  They are quite layered and yet self-defeating all at once.  Also as usual, Hoffman clearly disregards the core of John's worldview and hijacks his philosophy as an excuse to justify his own sociopathic tendencies.  Whereas John actually cared about his victims and hoped for their "salvation," as he sometimes called it, Hoffman does not share the same concerns.


Conclusion

The next film unfortunately abandoned almost all of what made Saw VI so well-crafted.  The acting, production values, plot, effects, script, and character development are inferior in quality.  Thankfully, before that travesty arrived Saw VI was able to so masterfully capture everything that fans love about the series.  It is definitely one of the greatest episodes in the franchise!


Content:
1. Violence:  This is one of the goriest Saw movies, with people cutting off flesh from their own bodies onscreen, the camera viewing Strahm's crushed corpse from Saw V, William dissolving onscreen from a powerful acid, and someone tearing a reverse bear trap off of his face.
2. Profanity:  As usual in this series, lots of profanity appears in some scenes.