Metacritic reviews

Director Darren Lynn Bousman, who also helmed the past two installments, doesn't deviate from the stylistic formula, which includes grinding industrial music, frenzied editing and a blue-gray color palette.

The trouble is that if you haven't seen the other entries in the cycle, or don't have all the characters committed to memory, you'll have trouble figuring out who anybody is or, in the end, what any of it is supposed to mean.

Even by the standards of the recent "Saws," which have enjoyed considerably larger budgets than the first pic, the new edition is more frenetically cut (by editors Kevin Greutert and Brett Sullivan), more dimly lit (by lenser David A. Armstrong), sweatier in terms of perfs by the grimly serious cast, more madly packed with micro-incidents and action, and more brazen in requiring suspension of disbelief.

If an hour and a half of so-called "torture porn" sounds like fun, you'll find Saw IV situated somewhere between the first in the cycle (a solid original with plenty of energy in it) and the last (a gasping copycat willing to do anything to stay alive).

Since the thing is increasingly impatient to jump forward to the next big torture set piece, there isn't any time to establish anyone's character. Butcher shops are bloody, too, but they're not scary.

Saw IV is bloody proof that Jigsaw may be dead, but his well of corporeal abuses has yet to run dry.

Fans know exactly what they're in for, while everyone else knows to stay far away. Everyone can agree, however, that this is probably the worst date movie ever. For non-sadists, at least.

It's a depressing experience to view something like Saw IV. It's not just the soullessness that's dispiriting, but the lack of invention. When a movie does little more than repeat what its predecessors accomplished with grotesque effectiveness, it's past time to tip this corpse into its grave and bury it.

For devotees of the series, the gore is still there and the traps are just as weird as they were in the other entries but for the rest of us, your mind will forget it the second the end credits roll.

Getting to the true root of his evil may necessitate "Saw LX."