Saw X Might Just Be the Franchise’s Best

Saw X is a lot of things. It’s almost unbearably disgusting, wickedly fun, delightfully inventive and unexpectedly sentimental. There’s also a very real chance that it will go down in history. And no, not because it’s the first movie to show someone getting their eyeballs vacuumed out while simultaneously having all of their fingers broken (well maybe for that reason, too), but because I’m pretty sure it’s the only time a ten-quel has been one of the best films in a franchise.
Indeed, being the tenth film in a series is never an easy task, and the Saw franchise has admittedly leaned back into the security blanket of its massive cult following as of late. 2017’s Jigsaw feels like a poorly composed cable cop show, for example, while 2021’s Spiral committed an even more egregious offense: Lazy traps! How does the Saw franchise recover from such a thing?
Luckily for us, in the comeback of the century, the Hollywood powers that be arranged an emergency meeting, compiled all of the things that diehard Saw fans love about the franchise, and put them into a movie.
Saw X follows Tobin Bell’s John Kramer/Jigsaw after he receives a terminal brain cancer diagnosis and is given mere months to live. John is attempting to accept his fate when a man from his cancer support group, Henry (Michael Beach), offers him a glimmer of hope. Henry has apparently received an experimental treatment that put him in complete remission. So John heads down to Mexico for the mystery cure. The only problem? The so-called doctors are actually con men and steal his money without offering him any medical care. So, John does what any normal person would do: He fills a garage with a bunch of wildly elaborate traps and sets out to get some revenge.
This last part is important. This time, Saw X really feels like a revenge flick, which is what the previous films have arguably always been too afraid to present themselves as. While the Saw franchise has always postured John as a semi-vigilante with a broken—but still present—moral compass, it’s undeniably more fun when we don’t attempt to justify his cruelties, and finally admit that he is just some crazy motherfucker doing some remarkably crazy shit.
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