Saw, Scrutinized

Lionsgate Saw VI offers a hilarious anti-Wall Street/pro-healthcare message—along with all the torture! Plus, Choire Sicha’s primer on the first five movies.

One Saw movie has arrived at the theaters every October since 2004—an early Thanksgiving present. Around the time Saw VII comes out next year, the franchise should have earned a billion dollars worldwide. Isn't that an awesome testament to capitalism, that two kids from Australia can make a 9-minute short, bring it to the golden shores of America, and (at least in part) own a billion-dollar franchise in under a decade?

So last night, a fairly paltry number of twentysomethings staggered to Manhattan's Union Square movie theaters for the very first showing of Saw VI. (Yes, it is the Roman numerals that give the slashy franchise the class.) Only about 70% were men; apparently for some young couples it is the romantic thing to do to see 12:01 a.m. weeknight horror-flick premieres.

Everyone seemed a little bleary and their expectations were, reasonably, not high. The franchise—it all started with a movie about an ethics-obsessed (if psychotic) cancer patient who plays murder-death-kill games with not-quite-good people, so as to teach them a lesson—began to decline as swiftly as it peaked. The last two movies, in fact, were a bizarre muddle of identical-looking police officers with flashlights exploring creepy bunkers, punctuated by bone-snapping gore and confusing flashbacks. You've never been so happy in your life to see someone die!

Watch the trailer for Saw VI

And yet, last night, Saw VI was greeted by howls of laughter and applause—because something amazing and unexpected has happened. The Saw movies have blown past their sorta-moral beginnings and later greater-pointlessness and reframed themselves as populist anti-corporate liberation propaganda.

Not only does the film open with the torture of evil and misguided mortgage executives, nearly the entire rest of the film is a slowly-exacted revenge against the evil of health insurance companies.

There is a long diatribe about human dignity and insurance policies and the role of the state and the individual.

There is also literally a conversation about contemporary practices in actuarial mathematics.

Which, you know: suck it, Michael Moore! In your face!

Now, don't let this surprising choice fool you into thinking this was filmmaking at its finest. Because the body count is so high, essentially the only long-term characters remaining (our cancer-ridden villain-hero died ages ago) are this one creepy cop (played by some guy who is the Australia-born poor man's Armand Assante) and the villain's ex-wife (played by a wonderful woman with a, how to say, absurdly inflexible visage—and an engagement ring from one of the producers, according to the Internet).

Oh but bless them all. What a delight. Wonkery famously goes wrong in movie franchises—as when Star Wars took a turn for endless space-congressional politics. But going wonk in a horror movie? Ludicrous, hilarious, wonderful.