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Men In Black 3

It’s not a sequel that needed to be made, but thanks to the charm of its leads and a tone that harks back to the wit and humour of the original, it’s a pretty enjoyable trip.

Bel Ami

The excellent female support cast saves this patchy effort, which is let down by its leading man and a flat screenplay.

The Dictator

A disappointing, often repulsive and mean-spirited mess of a film with seemingly only one real criterion on its agenda: to shock and offend.

The Woman In Black

Packed with atmosphere, this old-fashioned but deftly told ghost story delivers ample chills and thrills.

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Saw VI (Film)

by Anthony O'Connor | October 24, 2009 13:24 | Edited October 28, 2009 18:49

The horror series returns with more inventive gore and traps, but the reasoning behind them has gone out the window.

When watching the clever, if flawed, Saw many horror fans were delighted by its grisly inventiveness and intriguing plot twists. Look, it wasn't a work of pure genius, but it was clever and interesting and posed a lot of cool ‘what if' questions. Like, "what if you had to saw off your foot to save your family, could you do it?"

 

Then the sequel, Saw II came out and then Saw III. The sequels were lesser entities but still had their moments and had things ended with III with John Kramer aka: Jigsaw (played with great understated menace by Tobin Bell) dead, we might have been looking at a decent horror trilogy.

 

In much the same way had Friday The 13th ended with part IV (the so-called Final Chapter) that would have been a dandy quadrilogy.

 

However just as Friday The 13th V had a bloke pretending to be Jason Voorhees, Saw IV - Saw VI has featured a group of lesser characters carrying out Jigsaw's "will" and it just doesn't cut it.

 

Take Saw VI: yes the gore is extreme, yes the traps are inventive (although they're getting a bit silly), however the reasoning behind the "games" are getting murky.

 

With Jigsaw we had a dying man trying to make people value life. Simple, effective and thought-provoking. Take him out of the equation and you've got a bent cop and an ex-junkie and... well there are a few twists, and this time the victims relate to the current fiscal fears... but you need your good villain.

 

Hell, Friday The 13th VI knew it - they resurrected Jason with a bolt of lightning! Not to say Saw VI should feature a zombie Jigsaw, and admittedly Kramer features in a lot of the flashbacks (often the best moments in these latter Saw entries) but it just feels like this series has stopped being about anything.

 

Maybe they'll surprise us with the inevitable Saw VII, but right now this series is blunt, dull and should probably wrap things up before it becomes utterly redundant.