“Saw III” shows that the “Saw” franchise was already getting stale. It has an unnecessarily convoluted plot that tries to tie together all the previous films as well as violence that is more graphic than ever. It just becomes a complete mess.

Lynn Denlon (Bahar Soomekh “Crash”) is a doctor that finds herself abducted by Jigsaw (Tobin Bell “The Firm”) and Amanda (Shawnee Smith “The Blob”). They want her to use her skills to keep Jigsaw alive while a man (Angus Macfadyen “Equilibrium”, “Braveheart”) is put through a brutal series of tests. It will be a chance for vengeance yet there is even more going on and only Jigsaw knows all the tricks.

The Jigsaw character was legitimately interesting in the first movie but the sequels give us too much information. I disliked what they did with him in “Saw II” but this one just completely ruins the character for me. I didn’t care for any of the other characters. Most of them just seem to be there to be tortured. We see people stripped naked, burned by acid, blasted with shotguns and strapped to ridiculous devices that seem like rejects from the works of Edgar Allen Poe. There are just too many characters for us to ever get invested in any of them.

“Saw III” is even more violent than the previous two films. We see a graphic depiction of brain surgery with a power drill repeatedly going into a man’s head, a woman gets her skin ripped off by some whacky contraption and so many other disgusting acts happen. The way that the film jumps around, trying to connect everything to the events of the previous films just doesn’t work at all. The attempts to make everything deep and philosophical just comes across as desperate. This a film about slicing and dicing people; don’t pretend it’s anything more than that.