Saw VI Review

It was an uncommonly warm autumn day in London on the afternoon of Friday 23 October 2009: the sun was out, the birds were tweeting, and in screen three of the Cineworld Fulham Road, a young woman was graphically hacking off her own arm to save her head from being mashed in by a skull-cracking harness.

The gulf between director James Wan's first Saw film, and where we've ended up, is immense. Over the past five years, a tricksy, critically acclaimed crime thriller has morphed into a sprawling daytime soap with added gloop; a guaranteed annual cash cow for distributors Lionsgate, who cattily insist that film critics shell out for their own screenings. Oddly, these films don't tend to pick up very good reviews.

The biggest surprise, then, is that Saw VI isn't totally terrible. It's still a load of number twos, obviously. Just not enough to block the toilet. This has been achieved in one very simple stroke. Understanding that some of the best horror films utilise contemporary events to add a powerful frisson of credibility, director and former series editor Kevin Greutert and writers Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton have decided to lend the hermitically-sealed franchise some immediate, and wonderfully mischievous, relevancy.

Saw's gamers have never exactly been sympathetic (that's why they've been forced to crawl though those fiendish, flesh-flaying traps in the first place). But for Saw IV, the filmmakers have made them universal objects of scorn and loathing from the outset; nobody's going to mourn these guys. For this time round, the hapless game players-cum-victims are insurance executives and lenders. Hooray!