The makers of the “Saw” movies probably thought they were clever when they killed the villain off back in “Saw III.” But over time it’s become clear that, although Jigsaw’s many apprentices worked hard to keep his legacy alive, John Kramer — the raspy-voiced horror icon played by Tobin Bell — was the beating heart of this series, and that heart stopped.
Jigsaw is back in “Saw X,” but he’s also still dead. The film is one long prequel, taking place at an indeterminate time before most of the previous installments. It’s a little confusing to see Kramer drawing up plans for deathtraps that, as we learn later in the movie, he has already invented and used, but it’s a lot less confusing than the timelines of the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh films, which employed a dizzying flashback/flashforward/flashsideways structure that perhaps rivaled only “Last Year at Marienbad” in its temporal complexity.
Leave a Reply