It is impossible to explain why Saw X is such a disappointment without spoiling it, so I'm gonna have to do just that. This tenth installment in a series that should never have gotten ten installments starts off surprisingly strong. John gets scammed into paying $250k (apparently torturing people pays quite well) for a fake cancer treatment and he's not too happy about it. The setup is slow and the movie is almost an hour in when the killing starts to take off. It's definitely not bad though. The treatment story is done quite well and especially the scenes where Jigsaw and his little sidekick gather the victims are really quite good and make great use of silence and sound to build tension.
Once the traps get going, they get really intense. The first trap, the eye one shown in all the promo material, is just a little daydream John has. It's a bit of a letdown, but it's still quite brutal. The bomb-arms for the taxi driver felt lackluster, but that's forgiven when the real villains start their traps. There's some unmatched brutality in here, and it's all shown in intense, gory detail. It's what we're here for and Saw X delivers. For a little while I almost started to get my hopes up.
The issue with this movie starts in the last thirty minutes. Up until this point, the movie has been building up the main villain, Cecilia, as a pure evil being, almost laughably so. She likes killing kids, she wants to murder all her friends and she lives only for money. She's rotten to the core and you expect her to get her comeuppance in a fittingly brutal way. That would have been a fine ending to this movie. Just a brutal kill for Cecilia. It would've been cathartic and well deserved. But the writers had other plans, and they're pretty hard to grasp.
The last 30 minutes of Saw X are spent on ridiculous plot twists and double crossings that make no sense at all. As soon as Parker Sears barges in, the movie goes completely off the rails. Senseless monologues, deus ex machina kids, terrible acting by Steven Brand and worst of all: no karma for Cecilia. The villain that this movie has spent 90 minutes building up eventually gets off Scott-free by sticking her head through a gloryhole. That's it. No disembowelments, no amputations, no lobotomies. John pays off the kid he scarred for life with a bag of illegally obtained cash and they walk off into the sunset, leaving Cecilia to continue scamming and/or killing kids if she wants to. That's John's moral compass for you.
This complete lack of repercussions for Cecilia is just a kick in the balls and is the worst part about an already terrible ending. It ruins what could have been at least somewhat of a revival of the series and turns Saw X into nothing more than some decent gore scenes that leave a bad aftertaste because they happen to the wrong characters.
Once the traps get going, they get really intense. The first trap, the eye one shown in all the promo material, is just a little daydream John has. It's a bit of a letdown, but it's still quite brutal. The bomb-arms for the taxi driver felt lackluster, but that's forgiven when the real villains start their traps. There's some unmatched brutality in here, and it's all shown in intense, gory detail. It's what we're here for and Saw X delivers. For a little while I almost started to get my hopes up.
The issue with this movie starts in the last thirty minutes. Up until this point, the movie has been building up the main villain, Cecilia, as a pure evil being, almost laughably so. She likes killing kids, she wants to murder all her friends and she lives only for money. She's rotten to the core and you expect her to get her comeuppance in a fittingly brutal way. That would have been a fine ending to this movie. Just a brutal kill for Cecilia. It would've been cathartic and well deserved. But the writers had other plans, and they're pretty hard to grasp.
The last 30 minutes of Saw X are spent on ridiculous plot twists and double crossings that make no sense at all. As soon as Parker Sears barges in, the movie goes completely off the rails. Senseless monologues, deus ex machina kids, terrible acting by Steven Brand and worst of all: no karma for Cecilia. The villain that this movie has spent 90 minutes building up eventually gets off Scott-free by sticking her head through a gloryhole. That's it. No disembowelments, no amputations, no lobotomies. John pays off the kid he scarred for life with a bag of illegally obtained cash and they walk off into the sunset, leaving Cecilia to continue scamming and/or killing kids if she wants to. That's John's moral compass for you.
This complete lack of repercussions for Cecilia is just a kick in the balls and is the worst part about an already terrible ending. It ruins what could have been at least somewhat of a revival of the series and turns Saw X into nothing more than some decent gore scenes that leave a bad aftertaste because they happen to the wrong characters.