Movie Review: "Saw III" (2006)

DISCLAIMER: This review may contain spoilers.

"Saw III" is one of the worst movies in the 'Saw' series. The film sees the return of the Jigsaw killer, aka John Kramer, who is now on his death bed due to cancer. He orders his apprentice, Amanda Young, to kidnap a female doctor named Lynn in order to help him stay alive during his final test.

Lynn has no choice but to help because she happens to be wearing metal collar that is rigged to explode if she doesn't cooperate. And her husband is the lead participant in Jigsaw's test. The main problem with "Saw III" is that the writers attempted to aim for something emotional between Jigsaw and Amanda.

It tries to make us feel sorry for Jigsaw and depicts Amanda as this Jedi apprentice-type character. This is all wrong.

Furthermore, it was at this point in the series in which the other sequels began to suck. If you pay close attention, just about every film after "Saw III" became more and more repetitive, their stories stretched to painful extremes over a total of seven (Is it seven? I lost count) films.

As Jigsaw would say, let the games begin...

One of the most annoying things that you'll find in "Saw III" is an overuse of flashbacks. Now, anyone who has watched the 'Saw' movies knows that flashbacks are used to a certain extent, mostly towards the climax where everything is pieced together. But in "Saw III", there's a flashback around every corner, sometimes they even use to make sure they get a point across to the audience.

Talk about bashing someone over the head multiple times. Thanks a lot, we get the point. This movie uses flashbacks to think for the audience instead of letting the audience think for themselves (although a good deal of audiences nowadays don't have that capability, so I guess I can give "Saw III" credit for trying to help out).

A great deal of these flashbacks revolve around Shawnee Smith's character, Amanda, whose built-up character serves no purpose by the end of this film because we soon find out in the sequels that Detective Hoffman was Jigsaw's true apprentice all along. Seriously, what is the big deal with her character, it's not like she's as important as Jigsaw or Hoffman.

Is this a 'Saw' sequel or this a 'Star Wars' film? I found myself asking that question many times throughout "Saw III", especially during the scene where Jigsaw and Amanda are dressed in hoods and cloaks, then he's giving her wise advice. WTF!? There's so much built around their relationship in this film, especially a huge emphasis on master and apprentice themes.

Why is this in a 'Saw' movie? I don't know. As far as I'm concerned, Amanda should have died in "Saw II".

"Saw III" kind of feels like a bad episode of "ER" or "[Insert Hospital TV Show Here]". A huge portion of this movie is so caught up with saving Jigsaw's life and all of the medical details that go into it. Again, this also feeds into making us care for Jigsaw. But I don't want to care for Jigsaw, I want him dead. The man had it coming after all he put his victims through in the past two films.

• The series should have stopped at three, especially being that this was one of the worst ones. There was no need to draw this out over several sequels, the whole damn thing suddenly felt like an episodic TV horror show.