Another day, another Saw movie. When we last left the series, 'new' Jigsaw Killer Detective Mark Hoffman had neatly manipulated things to frame FBI agent Peter Straum for his own crimes and then tricked Straum into getting himself killed so that he wouldn't be around to contradict things. Meanwhile, John Kramer was still dead, Jill Tuck still had the box John gave her in his will... and Agent Perez, last seen getting a faceful of Billy the Puppet shrapnel in Saw IV, returns after being temporarily declared dead to protect her from whoever the Jigsaw Killer's apprentice was. This, of course, throws a spanner in Hoffman's careful plans, but it's surely nothing he can't fix...
This time around, we're focused on Hoffman's attempts to keep his secrets hidden as it turns out that his plan isn't nearly as flawless as he thought it was and forensics are catching on to every difference between his MO and John Kramer's. He still pushes the Peter Straum theory every chance he gets, but his personal link to the Seth Baxter case is looking to be his undoing. On top of that, Hoffman also has a new game to run, and his assistant for this one turns out to be... Jill Tuck, who, it turns out, knew what her husband was doing since Amanda Young's test and redemption. Part of what was in the box turns out to have been the details on all the victims of the new game, as well as the person being tested - William Easton, the CEO of the health insurance company who refused to fund an experimental treatment for John Kramer's tumour that could have helped him. Now William must make a whole new set of life-or-death decisions for his various employees, in order to try to save his own life...
You know, the Saw movies have always been a little preachy - punishing the guilty, stressing the importance of teamwork, justice and vengeance and trying to teach people to appreciate what they have in their lives - but Saw VI takes the proverbial cake with a hacksaw in it. Health insurance companies are bad, you guys! Even if you ignore how much the issue of health insurance was in the news in the US (and beyond) at the time of this film's release, the point is hammered home throughout the film with a jackhammer. Then, as a final blow that I can't believe was accidental, the health insurance company is called Umbrella Health ("Umbrella Health and Biohazards! Get a free G-Virus with every policy!"). But just in case you missed all that, there's a preachy little speech about the subject from John Kramer himself.
Speaking of John Kramer, his philosophy is really starting to fall down now. Not only do we have yet another case of him torturing someone who wronged him, but there's an awful lot of collateral damage in this game as well. So much for Jigsaw's claims that everyone has the same chance to rescue themselves and that what they've done has led them to this point - the janitor and secretary have done nothing to deserve being kidnapped and strung up, hoping for William to choose to save them rather than let them die horribly, even if you could argue that the rest of the victims at least did something to deserve their fates. And yet the series still seems to be trying to present Kramer as some sort of vigilante that we should be empathising with, rather than coming to the conclusion that the tumour pretty much killed his conscience.
Meanwhile, Detective Hoffman continues his subterfuge and backstabbing course from the Starscream School of Backstabbing (distance learning department), as we see him setting up Amanda Young to fail in flashback, and him being perfectly prepared to kill anyone who finds out his secret when forensics reveals that he's been setting up Straum all this time (amusingly, after killing three people, he then attempts to cover his tracks by utilizing the exact same method that they just disproved. I think Hoffman might be the dumbest apprentice of all). We're clearly not meant to be rooting for him to get out of this, so it's a celebratory moment when Jill Tuck reveals what else was in the box - and it's not Gwyneth Paltrow's head.
After they were seemingly pushed to second billing in the last film, the traps are back with a vengeance (hah) in Saw VI, and they're both suitably inventive and gruesome. The Shotgun Carousel is probably the one that stuck in most people's minds after the film was over, but Chekov's Tank of Hydrofluoric Acid was also particularly gruesome, and we can't forget the Pound of Flesh trap, where someone ends up chopping off an arm to survive. Interestingly, despite all that Saw VI was actually the lowest-grossing film of the series up to that point, although some of that might have come down to the fact that it was not screened for critics (never a good sign for a film) and it was going up against another film that Halloween - Paranormal Activity. Still, it's clear that the series was starting to wind down at this point, as it looked like there was nowhere left for it to go after this...
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