While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

.Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

I remember waiting for 'Saw V' to come out and reading the tagline "you won't believe how it ends". Now this was a piece of marketing genius. For a series that was already synonymous with twist endings (and incredibly good ones at that) to be claiming that on this occasion you won't believe what you're seeing, that's got to get you licking your lips. The downside of making that claim though is that you have to live up to it. So did it manage to? Not in your life. In fact it had the weakest ending of the entire series disappointingly.The other problem with this movie is that the story is nowhere near as riveting as other editions in the series. It's all very choppy and never feels like it gets into a rhythm. Also the concept behind some of the traps the group of 5 face don't entirely make sense. There was a bit of laziness in the writing of these.The strength the film possesses is the brutality. There are at least two scenes that are genuinely hard to watch and are very effective. The dialogue is also exquisitely written as it is in every 'Saw' movie. You'd probably have to say this is the weakest edition in the series, however it is still far from being a bad film.

Saw V is not even closely bloody and gore as it's prequels, but it has, in my opinion, the best traps so far. Trap that allows all five prisoners to escape alive is beautifully done and perfectly portrays human nature where panic and selfishness outweigh common sense and compassion. Finale is magnificent, but I have no idea how agent Strahm deserved to be tested. After Saw III and IV I thought that this franchise definitely gone astray and lost all sense, but fifth installment brought back the will to see it through. It's better than previous movie, but still way behind first two, because it does not bring anything new and original and there's no unexpected surprises and thrills, so franchise became a bit boring.6,5/10

Every time I watched the next Saw film, I always fell in love with the next one more. However, this one was a huge disappointment and poorly written. The only things I liked about this film were the plot and the music. Everything else was awful! This film always throws some of the stupidest traps at your face, which are just ideas that came from other films. Who wants to see that? And who's idea was to turn things like electricity and drowning into traps? I will also like to point out that this film doesn't even feel like a Saw film as much as a bad rip off of the Hunger Games.Also the twist at the end was very weak. Basically all that Strahm needed to do was trust Hoffman. Why does this need to be a lesson? Also they made a horrible decision in killing him off so soon. He just came on board the series and didn't have enough time to be a stand out character. This film was very poorly made, and as a huge Saw fan, I hate to say that.

I was very unimpressed with the previous Saw film, so much so that in my review I went into no detailed plot analysis. In the case of Saw V, there is no real plot to summarize. The film attempts to explain how Hoffman (Costas Mandylor) became entangled with the Jigsaw killer.It turns out he decided to impersonate Jigsaw's method to create an unwinnable trap in order to take revenge on the man who killed his sister. Jigsaw, who somehow knew in the third movie that a woman who has never come forward witnessed a crime, uses his God powers to find out Hoffman impersonated him and tries to convert him to Jigsaw-ism. In the meantime FBI Agent Strahm (Scott Patterson) turns out to have a history with Hoffman. The dim witted Strahm gets played like a harp from hell by Hoffman and ends up getting himself crushed to death in the trash compactor from Star Wars.We also have a reasonably likable group of thinly connected victims being put through a group trap, but the script cares so little about this group, it doesn't even connect their story to the main plot. If the makers of this film don't care about this group (one of whom is Julie Benz) than neither do I.And that's this movie's biggest crime. There is no one. Absolutely no one in it that the audience is given to care about, and the film doesn't even care enough about what it's showing us to offer us the thinnest of connecting fiber between the A story and B story. Mandylor would improve in the next, but the plotting wouldn't get any smarter. I guess this can just about be satisfying if you're in the mood for a Saw film, but any time put into thinking about what this film tells you to swallow will wreck the mood pretty quickly.