Saw IV Critic Reviews

Director Darren Lynn Bousman, who also helmed the past two installments, doesn't deviate from the stylistic formula, which includes grinding industrial music, frenzied editing and a blue-gray color palette.Read the full review

Even by the standards of the recent "Saws," which have enjoyed considerably larger budgets than the first pic, the new edition is more frenetically cut (by editors Kevin Greutert and Brett Sullivan), more dimly lit (by lenser David A. Armstrong), sweatier in terms of perfs by the grimly serious cast, more madly packed with micro-incidents and action, and more brazen in requiring suspension of disbelief.Read the full review

Saw IV is bloody proof that Jigsaw may be dead, but his well of corporeal abuses has yet to run dry.Read the full review

Fans know exactly what they're in for, while everyone else knows to stay far away. Everyone can agree, however, that this is probably the worst date movie ever. For non-sadists, at least.Read the full review

It's a depressing experience to view something like Saw IV. It's not just the soullessness that's dispiriting, but the lack of invention. When a movie does little more than repeat what its predecessors accomplished with grotesque effectiveness, it's past time to tip this corpse into its grave and bury it.Read the full review

He now imparts so many life lessons via his Rube Goldberg thresher devices that he's starting to turn into the Rod Serling of severed body parts. Now that's torture.Read the full review

One more small thing: Every other scene in Saw IV starts and ends with a potential victim pressing "play" on a tape recorder, to the point where it's almost funny.Read the full review