I would like to apologize to Guy Ritchie for using his name as shorthand for "flashbacks to a different perspectives of events we already saw." This might be the highest flashback-to-total-runtime of any movie I've seen, unless you count movies like Titanic where the whole thing is set in a memory as a framing device. Besides that, it feels pretty...toned down? The trademark editing tricks are almost completely absent, as is any attempt at sensationalizing self-harm (only a token few seconds in a flashback to saw 1.) The only times the gore gets truly lurid are the opening and ending scenes (my friends call the last trap in this movie the "yaoi box,") and the blood toll bit. There's no sexual violence and they barely even remember to stigmatize drug addiction. This is far and away the most tasteful film I've seen in a franchise known for people decrying it as "torture porn." And it's fucking boring. The main multi-stage trap is good and if you like saw gotcha twists there are actually *two* pretty solid ones but all the past segments are pure backfill exposition with no tension. It's very unclear how much of this movie was Hoffman's own* plot and how much was set up by Kramer before his death, and it's hard to care that Our Boy Mark was there for the events of the first three movies if he's just as much a puppet as Billy. My final random thought is that the aforementioned extended group-trap the movie is (kind of?) built around, despite being very solidly constructed as death-games go, is really impersonal and redundant to the film as a whole. In the previous films, the big elaborate traps are reserved for people Jigsaw has met and has some kind of beef with, and then the rest are randos, the serial killer victim equivalent of jobbers. In this one, the dynamic is flipped and the important characters get simple one-off traps in between their flashbacking, but we need an intricate death game to fill the saw formula. As a result, it's the movie-spanning multi-room murder-complex that gets the "just grab a random asshole or five and put them in the contraption" treatment. I guess it's an honest day's jigsaw killing? It occurs to me I'm being very premature in declaring these characters irrelevant without waiting three movies after their deaths. I'm sure they'll be in a dozen flashbacks in saw 7 and then I'll be sitting here with egg on my face. And then I'll have to stick my face in a frying pan to cook the egg within sixty seconds or a spike goes through my brain or something. I'm tired.

*good mayonnaise brand