Saw V: Critic Reviews

Saw V is dead on the table.

The latest and least of the Saw films is just plain boring and even a little tame -- albeit by the standards of a genre that helped bring the phrase "torture porn" into the lexicon.

Saw V is a terrible combination: grisly and tedious. Let's just call it bloody dull.

Oh, Jigsaw. Here we go again. You kill. I doze off. Someone at the studio goes 'ka-ching!'

The torture devices, once so fiendishly adapted to each offender, have become generic excuses to spatter gore. The script is insultingly lazy, and inept direction from newcomer David Hackl hardly helps.

The periodic traps set for five new victims, all linked by a rotten real-estate deal, are neither as terrifying nor as yucky as in the earlier films. The only real horror in these scenes, in fact, is the jaw-droppingly bad acting on display.

Saw V utterly mimics the original film's formula -- that awful basement, those cops chasing clues in what we assume to be the same time-frame, those awful devices of death.

Woefully ponderous, convoluted and improbable.

The creatives behind the franchise clearly have taken pride in their stylistic consistency throughout the series, but here they even fail to deliver enough of the cleverly gruesome Rube Goldberg torture devices that are its raison d'etre.

It's not a good sign when watching someone stick their hand into a table saw is easier than listening to them recite dialogue.

Sera que os fas da serie nao percebem que o conceito dos flashbacks e de mexer com a cronologia dos capitulos anteriores e uma forma encontrada pelos produtores para que possam refazer o original de novo e de novo e de novo?

A disappointing film that breaks all of the series' own rules.

Saw V? You'll wish you hadn't.

An insult to fourth-rate ripoffs of Se7en, and even that may not be harsh enough.

Being the fifth annual go-round for this durable splatter franchise, this film has really no power to change any minds.

...hardcore fans of Jigsaw's exploits will probably find something here worth embracing.

A cut above its pretentious predecessors; the graphic set-pieces -- including an opening inspired by Poe's 'The Pit and the Pendulum' -- deliver the gory goods.

Saw V or High School Musical 3? Make your choice. All of a sudden, picking between self-mutilation and disembowelment doesn't sound so frightening, does it?

Square in the middle of the series, quality-wise: though the new film has some unabashedly dumb moments, its plot lacks the pathetic contortions that we saw in Saw IV

Saw V may still have the power to make audiences squirm, but only for the most obvious reasons.

Nails? Where else but in a Saw movie can a puzzle-minded sadist cobble together elaborate torture contraptions from the same Home Depot that provides his replacement windows and his garage storage solution?

The blade is oh so dull on this Saw.