Everyone involved in the final Saw entry took big risks. One, it's sometimes called Saw 3D: The Final Chapter, trying to turn the latest sequel in a long-running horror series into event viewing. Two, they spent the money to make it a 3D film. Three, they helped pay for a second season of VH1's Scream Queens to gain more publicity for the film. Four, they went to the extreme in everything they did. If this is the final chapter for real, they did not leave anything to chance. It's also all too much. There's no focus. The story makes no sense. The traps are bizarre and (intentionally) impossible to escape. And poor Gabby West, winner of Scream Queens season 2, was clearly not liked and given a thankless 30 second role of screaming and cursing. Everything about this production is a misstep with one small exception.
The best plot element in the entire film is Jill Tuck versus Detective Hoffman. After Jill tried to leave Hoffman for dead at the end of Saw VI, she's has to go into hiding. She's willing to beg the police who have harassed her for years (or days, weeks, whatever the timeline is in this misguided Doctor Who adventure) for protection just to get away from Hoffman. Hoffman will not be deterred. He builds two elaborate tests just to draw the police away from Jill so he can get his revenge. The battle between Hoffman and Jill is one of the most thrilling things to happen in the entire Saw series.
There are more plots. A self-help guru who faked surviving a Jigsaw trap for fame finally gets his comeuppance. His entire publicity and management team is strapped into a series of impossible traps inspired by the guru's clearly impossible test he created for fame. The guru finally gets a chance to prove his worth in a Jigsaw trap and he is set up to fail at every turn. It's an interesting concept that doesn't work. We've already established that Hoffman will create un-winnable traps to punish the wicked; an entire film of them is boring.
We're not done yet. We have more dumb police doing dumb things to watch through. A newly introduced Internal Affairs detective is now in charge of the hunt for Detective Hoffman, which means he's the new expert on all things Jigsaw. He has to figure out where Hoffman is hiding so he can protect Jill Tuck and save whoever is trapped in the guru's game. The nicest thing I can say about this storyline is the apples the IA detective constantly eats look delicious and I like his coat.
The 3D effects are the schlock we'd see in the original 3D films of the 1950s. I'm really surprised they had the restraint to not hit a paddleball at the audience or hand out 4D scratch-n-sniff cards at every screening. It's all crappy perspective shots and blood and weapons flying at the camera.
The most intriguing element of the film is the twist ending, but that twist ending undoes the entire flimsy logic of the accomplice storyline started in Saw II. Still, it's nice to see some attempt to do something new with the end of the series. May it rest in peace and not be rebooted in two years.
The entire Saw series received a beautiful Blu-ray release. Otherwise, Saw VII can be rented from all the major digital platforms.