What do the Saw franchise and Cheryl Cole’s career have in common? They both should have ended after that toilet attack 20 years ago.

Saw X takes place between Saw and Saw II, but it might as well be set between Titanic II and Osmosis Jones for all the difference it makes to a franchise whose timeline is more messed up than the Jigsaw Killer himself. John Kramer (Tobin Bell) is a retired architect with an inoperable brain tumour and a sketchpad full of whimsical torture contraptions. When offered experimental cancer treatment in Mexico, he leaps at the chance to meet an assortment of racist stereotypes.

After the surgery turns out to be a scam, Kramer uses his architecture powers (?) to hunt down the grifters and force them to endure a Saw film. We don’t even see him track them down, or how he builds his Rube Goldberg machines, or where he procures his gallons of blood. Everyone is suddenly just chained to torture devices, with no story or mystery or any other thriller element. The only twist is when Jigsaw turns out to be one step ahead all along, which cannot be called a twist 10 films in.

There is also nobody to root for, given the Kramer vs. Faker choice between a torturer and people who steal from cancer patients. Maybe that nihilism is more effective when the traps are half inventive, but by this point Jigsaw is so limited to cutting off arms and legs that he should be called the Hokey Cokey killer.

And while an improvement on its procedural predecessor, Saw X features one of the worst scenes in the series: Jigsaw heroically rescuing a child who is being tortured, even though he could easily have stopped the child from being tortured in the first place. It is the most contemptuous moment in film so pointless and tiresome that by the time someone scoops out their own brain, all we feel is boredom and envy.