Plot

A sick and desperate John travels to Mexico for a risky and experimental medical procedure in hopes of a miracle cure for his cancer only to discover the entire operation is a scam to defraud the most vulnerable.

Cast

Tobin Bell, Shawnee Smith and Ragnarok's Synnøve Macody Lund shine.

Verdict

I'll be honest, I haven't enjoyed a Saw movie since Saw III. I thought Spiral breathed a small amount of life into the series but not enough to make it credible. Much like Final Destination they pounded out movie after movie each less inspired as the last! A dead franchise in my opinion. Hearing about another I couldn't have been less excited and after the watching the trailer and seeing it was a prequel had me confident this would be another bland uneventful final nail in the franchises coffin.

I'm man enough to admit when I'm wrong, and here I was wrong.

I don't like prequels, I deemed this a dead franchise, but somehow someway against the odds they delivered a decent enough film and I'd argue the 3rd best overall behind the original and part 2.

I just love how unexpected it is, you defies logic and reason and provides an engaging tale and one that doesn't rely on shock value or gore like many of those that game before did.

Good job, now I'm open to more.

Rants

I like Shawnee Smith, my first experience with her was as the crazy girl in the original The Stand (1994) but her presence here seemed strange on account of how much older she looks here then last time we saw her. They used no effect to make her look younger and the timeline subsequently made no sense. I know such things shouldn't matter but movies are about immersion and that took something away from it here.

Breakdown

Surprisingly decent plot Solid performances by many of the cast Has breathed new life into a dead series The Shawnee Smith age issue is annoying.

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.