CinePals React to Saw III: Carrie's Dissolving-Key Trap Called "the Biggest Notch" of the Franchise

Picking up right where Saw II left off, we went into Saw III already bracing ourselves, and it still managed to knock us sideways. Our overall verdict by the end was that this chapter felt more brutal and more "evil" than the second film, even if the very first Saw still scared us the most. What set this one apart, we agreed, was that for the first time there was genuinely no way out for some of the victims no matter what they did.

The chain trap in the opening room got to us immediately, especially once we realized the victim, Troy, had already lost the game before he even got his instructions, because the door to the room was welded shut. "I feel like this is kind of worse than the saw" was the comparison between the new ripping-through-flesh device and the classic leg saw from the first film. We went back and forth on whether the ankle trap or the jaw trap was worse, and we spent a long stretch trying to work out why the tape came out "clean" and why nothing about Troy's room matched Jigsaw's usual patterns, before Carrie's one-minute, dissolving-key trap left us saying flatly, "there's no purpose" and "there isn't" a way to win that one either.

Amanda's twist frustrated us before it finally clicked

For a big chunk of the movie we were genuinely annoyed. We kept saying Amanda "wasn't playing by the rules," and we admitted we were worried the whole franchise was about to stop making sense. The frustration came out directly: "I am actually very upset with Carrie," since it felt like she deserved more of a storyline than she got. It was only once Jigsaw started talking about testing someone's will to keep someone alive, and we noticed Lynn slipping back into old habits, that we realized the whole thing had actually been Amanda's test the entire time, and we felt relieved the rules we'd come to expect from the series still held.

The brain surgery and the pig room were the hardest scenes to sit through

The uncut brain surgery scene stuck with us, partly because it kept inviting comparisons to Grey's Anatomy, with the joke that it wasn't that different from a medical documentary, which we later learned was almost word for word the argument the filmmakers reportedly used to keep the scene from being cut. All that blood took a toll too, prompting the admission, "At one point I was like, I might pass out." The rotting pig carcass room hit differently, with a second admission: "That was me with the pigs."

By the end we were glad to see Amanda gone, unlike Saw II, where we admitted we felt sorry for her before feeling foolish about it. What kept us hooked despite all the frustration was the mystery itself, the puzzle of figuring out who ties into what before the movie reveals it, and we compared the whole experience to doing an escape room.