Perhaps if you pursue all of the little crimes you run into some big ones, because that is what happens here. The film opens with a couple lying in bed.
The woman gets up and by talking to herself you quickly learn that the guy in bed with her is her lover, not her husband, and may very likely belong to someone else. Her angry babbling wakes the man, of whom you never see much more than his hands and you do not hear his voice. Once he is awake, she tells him she is pregnant and that he should start spending whole nights with her, finally make the break completely to her. He quickly grabs her across the face, she screams, and the scene changes. In Brighton a rental management company has been broken into, and the police are investigating. But other than the damage done to the door in the break-in, nothing has been taken but the company's book of leases.
The fiendishly clever killer appears to be back from the dead in 'Jigsaw,' the eighth installment of the hugely successful horror film franchise. Jun 20, 2017 Lionsgate has revealed that the eighth installment of the Saw franchise will be titled Jigsaw, instead of the Saw: Legacy. But will Tobin Bell return?
This makes no sense to the officer in charge, because if somebody wants to run out on their lease, why not leave town since breaking and entering is an even bigger crime? The owner of the rental company is unhappy with the way the investigation is run, and calls the detective's supervisor to complain. The supervisor asks inspector Fred Fellows (Jack Warner) to help out. Fellows starts by asking about the leases that were getting ready to expire, and drives out to the house where the lease was going to expire the next week. The police do find the house seemingly deserted. They look around, find nothing amiss but do find a trunk in the garage with a dismembered woman in it. Thus a breaking and entering case has just turned to murder.
The problem is, this house was rented by a man, the police have no idea what his right name is, they have no idea who the woman is, and they have no motive. Because it was such a short term lease nobody in the neighborhood knows anything about the tenants. So the detectives begin to methodically go through any clue they can think of. They find a woman's name and address scratched on a pad in the house. They have the testimony of a woman across the street about the only time she ever saw the man outside during the day - it was from a distance, and then he had a vacuum cleaner in his hands and was paying for groceries, and they have the tools that were used to dismember the woman that were found in the house's incinerator.
From there the detectives go on to actually solve the crime. The closest comparison I can make is that it is like the first half of Law and Order transported to Britain from New York City, and it is truly fascinating. There are lots of dead ends, several interesting people that the police run into during their investigation, and always the press hounding them for a story.
I'd highly recommend this one.
The fiendishly clever killer appears to be back from the dead in this eighth installment of the hugely successful horror film franchise. 'How are you still alive?' A character screams to the titular villain in Jigsaw, the eighth installment of the hugely successful horror franchise. The answer, of course, is obvious. He's still alive because there's money to be made. John Kramer, the endlessly inventive psychopath who serves as the central character in the long-running series, died five films ago.
And the last, supposedly final installment, the lamentable Saw 3D, was released way back in 2010. But horror movie villains and the franchises in which they appear never really die. They're endlessly ready to be resuscitated and rebooted, especially if Halloween is just around the corner. The Spierig Brothers, the Australian siblings whose credits include Daybreakers and Predestination, directed this edition which takes place 10 years after Jigsaw's death. But just because he's dead doesn't mean that he can't still make trouble. In this case, it means five hapless victims trapped in a farm rigged up with enough lethal Rube Goldberg-style homicidal contraptions to fill a dozen perverse theme parks.
Meanwhile, a series of mutilated corpses are discovered, each bearing the distinctive stamp of missing jigsaw-shaped flesh. Detectives Halloran (Callum Keith Rennie) and Hart (Cle Bennett) are on the case, which doesn't go well when the suspect they're pursuing gets shot in the chest before he can provide any information. Medical examiners Logan Nelson (Matt Passmore) and Eleanor Bonneville (Hannah Emily Anderson) have their hands full dealing with the bodies, one of whom they refer to as 'Buckethead' because his face was encased in one just before running into a circular saw. The elaborate machinations with which Jigsaw torments his victims pale in comparison to the ones in the screenplay by Josh Stolberg and Peter Goldfinger. The scenarists clearly exhausted themselves in their effort to make credible the return of the character played so vividly by Tobin Bell. Moviegoers are likely to feel equally tired after suffering through the film's convoluted twist ending.
It's the sort that might have seemed awfully clever in brainstorming sessions but here mostly involves a character endlessly yammering on to make everything we've seen in the last 90 minutes vaguely explicable. Nor are the various torture contraptions particularly clever. By the time two characters are threatened with the possibility of being buried alive in a grain silo, you get the feeling that Jigsaw is running out of inspiration. Even the hidden crimes they've committed, to which they have a habit of confessing under the right sadistic circumstances, are more mundane than usual for the series.
Considering the long amount of time since the last installment, you'd think that more effort would have been put into creatively reviving the franchise. But Jigsaw just seems rote and mechanical, with long stretches of its running time feeling like a police procedural or CSI spinoff.
The film at least boasts some strong female characters, such as Anna (Laura Vandervoort), who proves the most resourceful of the would-be victims, and Eleanor, the pathologist who has a kinky fascination with Jigsaw. Genre fans will be satisfied by the copious amounts of gore on display, with the viscera looking particularly impressive when blown up to Imax film proportions.