After the first three Saw movies, I was very reluctant to say it is a B movie series.? It would have been a slap in the face to countless actors, production staff, and writers.? After witnessing dozens of memorable scenes from Saw I through Saw III, I’d have gladly called it an A- series.? True, it did sometimes dip here and there, but the films always left unforgettable impressions and portrayals of humanity’s deeper, blacker side.

However, after seeing the step down from Saw III to Saw IV, and the somewhat off-kilter gore tour through Saw V, I am downgrading my opinion of the series.???

Saw V leads you to think it begins like all the rest of the series has: with a victim facing death or a twisted, maiming “redemption” at the hands of Jigsaw, the architect turned tormenter and self-perceived killer-savior of many.? But this is not Jigsaw’s work.? It is a copycat’s; the trap, designed to stop after permanently disfiguring and disabling its victim with crushed hands, kills its victim after he accepts his punishment.

Who is the copycat?

It’s none other than the treacherous Lt. Hoffman, who had a part in the deaths of officers Mathews (sp) and Rigg in Saw IV.? But when did it happen?

Cut to more events just after the events in Saw III (again, just like in Saw IV).? Hoffman is seen leaving the trap-loaded warehouse just after the death of his mentor Jigsaw, and just after the lethal “testing” of Officer Rigg.? And Agent Strahm, after shooting grief-crazed Jeff Reinhart in Saw III, finds himself challenged to accept his fate in Jigsaw’s death chamber, now sealed shut by Hoffman.??? Strahm, one of the sharpest characters in the series, discovers a secret exit.? A tape placed further down a passageway offers him one last chance at salvation.? He ignores it, is attacked by an assailant wearing a pig mask, and blacks out.? He comes to in a horrifying, seeming unalterable drowning trap.? A deus ex machina allows him to escape.

It is here that, while the escape is a brilliant move on Strahm’s part, shows the sloppiness of his captor, the same bumbling fallibility that maimed the first victim of the movie.

After viewers are left hanging for an entire movie, guessing about the fate of Jeff Reinhart’s daughter, allegedly (and low-budgetedly) caught in an offscreen timed oxygen-deprivation trap, Hoffman triumphantly boosts his career, “escaping” the scene of Jigsaw’s last stand with Jeff’s daughter Corbett.? However, Strahm too manages to escape and one of the best scenes in the movie takes place: a baffled Hoffman loses his composure as he sees Strahm being carried away on a stretcher.? Hoffman has more cleanup work to do.

In yet another videotape, but this time one filmed more tenderly than those he made for his victims, Jigsaw records a final message for his alienated ex-wife, milfy, makeup-paralyzed Jill Tuck.? After all the smack talk Jigsaw gave his victims, this tape rings hollow, and instead of helping me sympathize with Jigsaw as a pained husband, it makes my skin crawl.

And the exchange between Jigsaw’s attorney and Tuck just goes awry.? It seems wooden, cliched, and Tuck’s character seems almost as lifeless as Jigsaw’s puppet Billy.? To quote Brad Pitt in Se7en, “what’s in the bawwwwx?”? Guess I’ll need to pay $10.50 to find out.

Strahm, at deceased Agent Perez’s blood-stained bedside, confronts Hoffman with Perez’s last whisper, “Hoffman” (so?).? Emotive slab of beef Costas Mandylor, as Hoffman, rattles off well-worn threats to Strahm.? It sounds like he doesn’t even believe his own words.

?Strahm then begins doing research on Hoffman’s past, leading him to the death of the Hoff’s sister at her boyfriend’s hands, and the death of her boyfriend at Hoffman’s.? Here the Saw back story begins to fill in, bridging story gaps from Saw I through Saw III.? In a nutshell, it says: Hoffman was helping too.? There seems to be absolutely no credibility in Hoffman’s conversation and conversion with Jigsaw.? With a gun barrel tucked between his legs pointed right at big H’s face through most of the conversation, it’s like Psycho meets Brokeback Mountain.? It is interesting how Jigsaw shows mercy to Hoffman above and beyond his usual hair-trigger actions, but Hoffman is so hostile and foul-mouthed it seems the only reason Jigsaw would decide to tutor him is to use him.

Anyhoo, enter the meat and potatoes of the movie: five seemingly unacquainted people begin a harrowing journey through four lethal trapped rooms.? There’s a cute and fluffy fire inspector (Ashley), a washed-out playboy (Mallick), an improbably chesty city planner (Luba), a cold, calculating real estate company owner (Brit), and a bitchy, scene-stealing journalist (Charles) who could be the scourge of any Starbucks.? Only Charles manages to stand out; the rest may as well be Jigsaw’s mannequins, with boring officespeak and random bits of overacting to punctuate things.?

Here, by turns, are some of the nastiest, most ingenious, visually different traps in the series.?? Surrounded by gorgeous, deeply grim industrial settings, these traps are second only to those in Saw III.? This time, there’s a perverse team motif to each trap, with a vicious lesson taught by the last trap.

I usually miss problems in the script, but there were a few in this section of the movie.? One of the traps was based on an arcane bit of electrical know-how.? Why would the characters, more comfortable sipping lattes than talking wiring, have the slightest inkling of how the trap could work properly?? And the final trap could have been overcome by, of all things, peeing in it.? There is a bathtub in the next to last room, filled with water.? With all the hyperventilation in the first two rooms, I would have thought the characters would have grabbed some water to drink, leaving them with full bladders, and one of them with the means to get it where it had to be in the trap.??

The cinematography through the rooms begins well, gets intense in the second room, winds down in the third room, and by the fourth room, everything is resolved with an irritating series of choppy strobes back and forth across the trap.? At the same time, the chemistry, or lack of, between the survivors hurts the viewing experience like the slow, dull throb of a recent hammer blow to the thumb.?

As the people navigate through the traps, or try to, Agent Strahm plays sneak ‘n’ peek with Hoffman’s files.? Hoffman begins a counterattack, leading him to deceive Strahm’s superior.? A lot of it is pretty dull and cliche, the ol’ framing routine.? Zzzzz.?

Hoffman just isn’t enough of an interesting character to base a movie around.? He lurks and skulks like Mr. Horse from Ren and Stimpy, with lines barely more interesting than “Mmmmmmmm”,”Ohhhhhhhhh”, and “No sir, I don’t like it.”? Where Jigsaw was powerfully bitter in his words and brutal in his ideas and deeds, Hoffman is an order-taker who lost his boss two movies ago.? All his nefarious deeds, including his dull taped messages, were all done better by Jigsaw.?

The movie manages to squeeze in one last trap at the end, but its activation and purpose are absurd and campy.? The trap bucks up at the end with a horrid, explicit payoff, but chances are the first half of the sequence will leave you with a bad foretaste.? And worst of all, the movie, aside from a lot of extra corpses, basically leaves off where it began.

Paging Tobin Bell and a ton of script doctoring…