Trilogies of terror: “Saw III” and “The Santa Clause 3”

As we know it today, the trilogy is an artistic attempt to make the piece in question seem somehow rounded and intentional, something where each installment is equally important to the point of some great, all-encompassing work. It’s an idea that encompassed mainstream cinema in 2006, where “part three” figured no fewer than six times. Common for sequels, but not trilogies. How odd it is to find two of these part threes—both, in their own way, touted to be “final chapters”—placed practically side by side in theaters while being offered to nearly opposite audiences.

“Saw III” finds John Cramer, the Jigsaw Killer (Tobin Bell) bedridden, the cancerous tumor in his brain finally taking its toll. However, with protégé Amanda (Shawnee Smith) in tow, he still finds the time to kidnap those he finds “ungrateful” for life and hook them up to a variety of limb-rending death traps. John considers his latest “test” to be his masterpiece, and wants to live long enough to appreciate it; so of course Amanda kidnaps a brilliant doctor (Bahar Soomekh) and hooks her up to a nasty collar rigged with shotgun shells. If John’s heart rate drops to zero, then the collar will fire its payload.

The victim du jour is Jeff (Angus Macfayden), a wreck of a man obsessed with attaining revenge on the drunk driver who killed his son. John kidnaps the driver, along with various other folks who contributed to his light punishment, and forces Jeff to decide whether to let them live or die. John’s lessons this time around pertain to the empty uselessness of revenge, but what really grabs me about the film is how it implies that no party is innocent of that conceit.

It’s an idea propounded early in the film, when we learn that Jigsaw’s MO has apparently been drastically altered—it seems that more recent victims are doomed even if they manage to escape their mechanical captors. Although explained away later on, it sticks in our minds, and it acts as a subtle criticism of the “Saw” series itself. After all, for all of its lectures about forcing victims to appreciate life, these movies wouldn’t be getting anywhere without their heaping, bloody body count. Although it technically ends with a few more attempts of the old proselytizing, we still won’t be able to dismiss an earlier, stronger moment when John undergoes graphic brain surgery. It is a scene that offers more emotional pain than anything that any of the “Saw” films have offered thus far. Moreover, it’s just enough to make us think that the film sees John as a delusional, petty hypocrite, a sadist who uses his condition as an excuse for a God complex and has been lucky enough to avoid the physical (and more importantly, ideological) punishment he has doled out until this point. It’s either heartbreakingly ironic or cruelly appropriate that it’s all for the sake of keeping him alive.

“Saw III”—indeed, the entire “Saw” series—can be seen as an attempt to counter the grim nihilism of David Fincher’s “Seven.” Refusing to give its own John Doe moral and intellectual superiority, it argues that a wayward soul is not synonymous with a guilty one; it’s merely the case of a smarter-than-average coward taking advantage of “fools rush in.” As a result, it feels like something well rounded, and completes a cycle on how we hurt our fellow man while managing to take its own sadism to task. I can’t imagine where the planned “Saw IV” could be headed after all that.

No matter how you feel about “Saw III” and its commentary on selfishness, however, at least it’s conscious of its own indulgence. That is, unlike its threatrical trilogy counterpart, “The Santa Clause 3,” a movie that I’m probably partly responsible for, given my positive-but-now-inexplicable 2002 review of “The Santa Clause 2.” Mea culpa. This time around, Scott Calvin, aka Santa Claus (Tim freaking Allen) bringing the moronically oblivious in-laws (Alan Arkin and Ann-Margret) into an episode of “Home Improvement” where he must convince them that the North Pole is actually Canada. Meanwhile, the diabolical Jack Frost (Martin Short), tired of being winter’s second banana, is intent on turning “Christmas” into “Frostmas.” Taking Scott back in time and co-opting his chance to don the red suit that gave him the job, Frost succeeds in becoming the new Santa, eventually turning the North Pole into a nightmarish amusement park of capitalism. I suppose it could be seen as brilliant in a meta-ironic sort of way—after all, haven’t Christians been telling us that it’s Santa Claus himself who has been taking the “Christ” out of Christmas for years now? But what does it mean, then, when the season is in turn stolen from Claus and transformed into, um, exactly the materialistic, children-screaming-in-malls holiday that it already is? The film is a product, built on a foundation of candy-coated cynicism where dramatic conflicts last about 15 minutes, deep-seated resentment is solved by magical hugs and other such red-and-green glurge. So ends a trilogy of crass commercialism; truth be told, weighed against “Saw III,” I find “The Santa Clause 3” to be the more nauseating film.