The Big Picture

• Jigsaw's motivation in the Saw franchise is to make people prove their desire to live through torturous tasks, but his inconsistent and unfair approach makes him a hypocrite.
• Jigsaw's victim selection is often contradictory to his beliefs, punishing people who have no disregard for life and showing personal vendettas, highlighting his unfairness.
• Jigsaw's traps are nearly impossible and often have short time limits, making it difficult for victims to survive even if they complete their tests, revealing his lack of fairness and disregard for human life.

It’s not strange to see a horror movie where the villain thinks they’re some kind of hero. After all, every good horror film needs a motivated antagonist, and what’s a better motivation than one that is a twisted form of justice? It’s something that makes horror that much more uncomfortable; if you can see the bad guy’s side, it makes you feel like you have some kind of connection with them, and the last thing you want is to understand the guy running around killing and maiming.

However, if a good motive makes a movie villain, then a poor one breaks them. When a villain is inconsistent, unfair, or hypocritical — especially in a way that’s not well done — it just makes you hate them. And yeah, that’s the point, but there’s a difference between hating them because they deserve to be hated and hating them because they suck as a character. And no horror villain is quite as hypocritical as the Saw franchise’s Jigsaw. With 2023's release of Saw X, there was renewed focus on John Kramer, a.k.a. Jigsaw, as a character, and it's high time we called a spade a spade — by that, I mean Jigsaw is a big jerk!

What Is Jigsaw's Motivation in 'Saw'?

Just in case you aren’t in the loop, the Saw franchise is a series of brutally bloody films. These movies follow a serial killer named John Kramer (better known as Jigsaw, played by Tobin Bell), a former engineer who is slowly dying due to an inoperable brain tumor. After attempting to commit suicide, he finds a new sense of appreciation for life. He uses a series of traps and games to torture and test his victims’ will to live as a way to inspire the same change in others…if they survive, that is.

Now, that might sound like a decent motivation. Obviously, there’s some kind of lesson that Jigsaw is trying to teach, and he says in the series that he doesn’t derive any pleasure from seeing his victims fail; in fact, he wants them to live! He simply believes that people should have to prove their desire to live by subjecting themselves to his tasks. Even if that means sawing off your leg. Or putting your hand in a jar of acid. Or opening up someone’s stomach to find the key to unlock the bear trap on your head. Except, Jigsaw doesn’t actually want that at all. As much as he calls himself fair and just, there are many things about him that are neither. He is unfair. And he is absolutely a murderer (despite saying that he isn’t one).

How Is Jigsaw a Big Hypocrite?

It’s important to start with the hypocrisy of Jigsaw as a basis for proving his absolute jerkiness. There seems to be a pattern in his choice of victims. They are often bad people who have a disrespect for human life. They are criminals, they are insurance workers who denied people coverage — which makes sense, as Jigsaw himself is dying of terminal brain cancer — they are just generally people that Jigsaw feels have thrown their life — or someone else’s — away in one way or another. This does align with his beliefs. After all, his goal is to make people see the error of their ways in the same way he had, and his awakening happened after he tried to take his own life.

The problem comes in the form of the victims who don’t fit this ideology. One such victim is Daniel Matthews (Erik Knudsen), a teenage boy captured due to his connection with his father, a crooked cop named Eric Matthews (Donnie Wahlberg). Though Daniel does survive with the help of Jigsaw’s protégée Amanda (Shawnee Smith), it is unfair for him to be part of the trial at all, as he had done nothing to show that he didn’t know the value of life. Jigsaw is punishing him for the sins of his father, which is directly contradictory to his belief that people must solve their own problems and prove their own willingness to live, and that his victims should be someone who shows blatant disregard for life.

We can also look at his reasoning for choosing his victims in Saw X as an example of his hypocrisy and general unfairness. Jigsaw often says he never chooses victims due to his own personal vendettas, but because they're bad people. However, there is no way that Jigsaw chose the people he did in the film without any hint of personal grudge. They are people who scammed him and took advantage of his hope for a treatment to cure him. In his defense, Dr. Ceclia Pederson (Synnøve Macody Lund) absolutely deserved to be tested, though.

She is the ringmaster of the scam to steal money from dying people who see her fake treatment as a glimmer of hope. However, she receives a slap on the wrist compared to her partners in crime, who get more difficult and dangerous traps to handle in far less time. One of them even wins their game only to be killed by Cecilia! And yet, her trap has a time limit of ten minutes, and it just requires her to kill someone she doesn't care about and stick her head out of a hole. Considering Jigsaw is all about the crime fitting the punishment, it's unfair to see him let off a cold-blooded killer and scam artist so easily while the others receive much harsher treatment.

Jigsaw Claims to Be Fair But He Isn't

This leads directly to the next point: unfairness. Daniel’s case is a great example of this, as he is chosen not for his own misdeeds, but for someone else’s. Not to mention, he’s a kid. He hasn’t had enough time to understand the world, much less life, to deserve Jigsaw’s wrath. However, in the same set of trials as Daniel is Addison Corday (Emmanuelle Vaugier), and she is another example of the unfairness of our villain. Addison also gets abducted due to her connection to Eric Matthews, as well as her work as a prostitute. The connection, though, is that Eric forged evidence that got her wrongly arrested. There’s not much that suggests that she doesn’t value her own life or others, and yet she is tossed into these trials and ultimately dies despite showing a will to live as she sticks her hands in a box full of razors to get the antidote that will save her life. And of course, there is Saw IV’s Morgan (Janet Land), who is given a trial by Jigsaw due to “allowing” the abuse of herself and her daughter at the hands of her husband. This one could possibly be debated — Jigsaw does give her the chance to kill her abuser — but it seems more like victim blaming than justice when Jigsaw says she deserves to have her will to live tested.

Just like his victim selection, his trials and tribulations can be unfair. For example, there are many traps that rely on the main person being tested for survival, such as Jeff Denlon’s (Angus Macfadyen) trial in Saw III. Jeff lost his son, Dylan, in a drunk driving accident, and his trial asks him to help three people involved with the accident: the drunk driver, Timothy Young (Mpho Koaho); a bystander who didn’t help, Danica Scott (Debra Lynne McCabe); and the man who gave Timothy a light sentence, Judge Halden (Barry Flatman). These are all individuals whom Jeff would naturally want revenge on, which drastically lowers their chance of survival in the game from the start. Because of Jeff’s anger over his son’s death, he is slow to help all the victims, and this leads to both Danica's and Timothy’s deaths. Neither of them gets the opportunity to help themselves; they have to rely on a man who already holds contempt for them. This directly contradicts Jigsaw’s statement that his victims have a fair chance to win the game, and shows that he isn’t in this just to give people a new outlook on life; he wants to see people suffer.

Jigsaw Doesn't Give His Victims Enough of a Chance

Not to mention, many of his singular traps are nearly impossible, even if you do manage to “win.” One such example is the razor wire maze of the first film. Crawling through razor wire is no picnic, and when you’re timed to do it, you’ll naturally panic and move quickly. Guess what happens? You get cut. A lot. So much so that you’ll probably bleed out before you get to the end of the challenge. And even if you do make it out, you’re still bleeding heavily and help may not arrive in time to save the life you just fought for. Similarly, the pound of flesh trap could be a death sentence even for its victor. If you cut off your arm (as winner Simone (Tanedra Howard) does), and are unable to get help after the trial, you’ve once again lost. There’s also the short time limit of many of the traps.

The angel trap has to be beaten in just 60 seconds and requires Allison Kerry (Dina Meyer) to stick her hand in a jar of acid to retrieve the key. The death mask has the same time limit and requires its victim to cut out their eye to reach the key. Given the state the victims are naturally in — panicked and terrified — these short limits are often too little for participants to gain their bearings enough to listen and comprehend Jigsaw’s instructions. After all, we’re not talking about people trained to withstand torture and high pressure; these are just regular people. This gets worse as the series goes on, and in Saw X, it's the worst it's ever been, with people being asked to cut open their skulls and remove parts of their brains or cut off their legs and suck the marrow out of their femur in only three minutes. What the hell, Jigsaw? You said you were playing fair!

As Well as Being a Murderer, Jigsaw Is a Big Jerk!

It's also worth noting that there are times that even when someone has earned their life by completing their test, they still die. Saw X's Gabriela (Renata Vaca) is a perfect example of this. She wins her life by busting up her foot and hand to escape her shackles, and she is on the verge of death between her injuries and the radiation burns she'd received due to her trap. However, as she escapes, Cecilia makes her move and catches Jigsaw in a trap of her own, and she kills Gabriela, even as Jigsaw pleads with her to get Gabriela to the hospital. This may seem like just an unfortunate consequence, and Jigsaw refers to it as such, but, later, he reveals that he had figured out Cecilia's plan long before that moment and knew what she would do. He allows it to play out instead of putting a stop to it, and ultimately, a person who earns their life by Jigsaw's rules still dies because of one of his other games that wasn't meant for her. Rather hypocritical, isn't it?

Finally, let’s clear something up. Jigsaw is definitely a murderer. Some people like to debate this, since he doesn't kill anyone outright; he instead kills them in traps. This doesn’t matter in the slightest. He kidnaps people with the intention of making them participate in deadly games and putting them in traps. Let's be honest; he fully expects at least some of these people to die. In fact, he may have even wanted some of them to! So, yes, he’s absolutely a killer, which makes him a terrible person for sure. However, when you pile on his hypocrisy, unfairness, and inconsistency in his victim choice, rules, ideology, and traps, well… You realize he really is just a big, huge jerk in addition to being a murderer.

Saw X is available to rent and buy on Apple TV+ in the U.S.

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