REVIEW: Saw
"Saw" is one of those movies with an irritating title that makes it a pain to talk about, because you'll inevitably end up asking people if they "saw 'Saw'" and "did you see 'Saw'" and feeling like a moron. All you want to do is ask a question about a movie and the stupid title forces you into third-rate sitcom dialogue that fails to trigger canned laughter in real life. I hate when movies make me change the way I have to speak, like when I ask people about "Legend of the Overfiend" and have to come up with less offensive terms for "cartoon tentacle rape." Which is hard, considering that the only way to describe "Legend of the Overfiend" is by mentioning "cartoon tentacle rape."
"Saw" is another film about a fiendish serial killer that, as the film points out, doesn't really kill people. Instead of murdering people outright, he uses improbably elaborate traps to make people either kill themselves or kill other people. Luckily, the bizarre traps that the "Jigsaw Killer" creates are both gruesome and entertaining. Here's a rundown (spoilers abound):
1. He puts a woman in an evil set of braces that will separate her jaw and her head if they're not removed with a special key. Unfortunately, the key is in the stomach of a dead man across the room, so she has to gut the body in order to get it. Unfortunately for the body, the man isn't dead, and has only been heavily drugged so that he cannot move. Even when someone is cutting open his stomach.
2. He puts a naked man in a room with a safe in the middle and broken glass covering the floor. It must not've been the man's lucky day, because he was poisoned, and the antidote was in the safe. The combination was printed on the walls of the room, but it was mixed up with a lot of other digits, and it was awfully dark. Luckily, he had a candle to guide him! A real shame that his body was covered with a highly flammable lotion, though.
3. The subject: fat man. The obstacle: room full of tangled razorwire. The challenge: the door on the other side of the room will shut forever very, very soon. The result: he got thinner.
4. Two men are locked in a dirty bathroom, legs chained to the wall. A dead body lies in the middle of the room in a puddle of his own poisoned blood, which was escaping from the gaping hole he put in his head with a nearby gun. The objective: kill the other in order to live. Or, if they're in a differnt kind of mood, saw off their own feet to escape.
That last scenario is where we meet our main characters, played by Cary Elwes and (writer) Leigh Whannell. Elwes is an arrogant doctor with a wife and child who're being held hostage by the Jigsaw Killer, and Whannell is a photographer who was paid to take surveillance photos of Elwes and remind him that he looks funny whenever he's not playing the Dread Pirate Roberts. Also thrown into the mix is Danny Glover, as a cop obsessed with the serial killer who's kicked off the force after he makes a stupid decision that gets his partner killed. This will be the first of many stupid decisions that his character makes, so get used to it. There're a couple more people in the cast, but they actually matter so little that I'm not sure there'd be a point in listing them. All the characters here are essentially just pieces of a puzzle, or pawns in a game, with about as much real personality.
Like almost every episode of the Twilight Zone, Jigsaw's victims usually wake up in their predicament with no idea of how they got there, or why they were chosen. In the end, we're told who the killer was, but it's so arbitrary and the buildup to it is so ineptly handled that it doesn't really make any difference. As far as the plot of the movie goes, it would've been better handled if the identity of the killer wasn't revealed at all, and it stuck to the strong point: the puzzles. If this movie had a Jigsaw Killer that just went around and took jigsaw-puzzle-shaped pieces from his victims, it would've been a direct-to-video Steven Baldwin film. Instead, the puzzles make this film worth sitting through, and kick it (slightly) above the ranks of its kin. Since the characters aren't really fleshed-out, watching the movie is slightly like watching someone play an adventure-puzzle video game. You think logically along with the characters, but you don't emotionally connect to them. Still, the puzzles are fun, if disgusting, and I spent a long time trying to figure out what I'd do if I were in those situations.
Aside from the puzzle gimmick, the movie is probably deserving of all the hellfire blasts it's been getting from critics. The acting in the movie isn't exactly on the strong side, which may be the result of not having any rehearsals whatsoever (according to the IMDB entry). The characters are all a little crazy and inconsistent, and it's kind of a letdown when you know how good some of the actors can be. (Ever see Danny Glover in "Raisin in the Sun"?) The acting, plus the craptastic 'I'm really making a music video' 'edgy' 'hip' 'fun' 'gritty' style of the movie are the real killers. I suggest that the next time anyone in the world wants to make an 'edgy' 'hip' or 'gritty' film, they be forced to watch "The House on Haunted Hill" and "Thirteen Ghosts" and then flogged if they even attempt to recreate any effect used in either of those movies. And then flogged again just to help them forget that they watched them.
"Saw" is another film about a fiendish serial killer that, as the film points out, doesn't really kill people. Instead of murdering people outright, he uses improbably elaborate traps to make people either kill themselves or kill other people. Luckily, the bizarre traps that the "Jigsaw Killer" creates are both gruesome and entertaining. Here's a rundown (spoilers abound):
1. He puts a woman in an evil set of braces that will separate her jaw and her head if they're not removed with a special key. Unfortunately, the key is in the stomach of a dead man across the room, so she has to gut the body in order to get it. Unfortunately for the body, the man isn't dead, and has only been heavily drugged so that he cannot move. Even when someone is cutting open his stomach.
2. He puts a naked man in a room with a safe in the middle and broken glass covering the floor. It must not've been the man's lucky day, because he was poisoned, and the antidote was in the safe. The combination was printed on the walls of the room, but it was mixed up with a lot of other digits, and it was awfully dark. Luckily, he had a candle to guide him! A real shame that his body was covered with a highly flammable lotion, though.
3. The subject: fat man. The obstacle: room full of tangled razorwire. The challenge: the door on the other side of the room will shut forever very, very soon. The result: he got thinner.
4. Two men are locked in a dirty bathroom, legs chained to the wall. A dead body lies in the middle of the room in a puddle of his own poisoned blood, which was escaping from the gaping hole he put in his head with a nearby gun. The objective: kill the other in order to live. Or, if they're in a differnt kind of mood, saw off their own feet to escape.
That last scenario is where we meet our main characters, played by Cary Elwes and (writer) Leigh Whannell. Elwes is an arrogant doctor with a wife and child who're being held hostage by the Jigsaw Killer, and Whannell is a photographer who was paid to take surveillance photos of Elwes and remind him that he looks funny whenever he's not playing the Dread Pirate Roberts. Also thrown into the mix is Danny Glover, as a cop obsessed with the serial killer who's kicked off the force after he makes a stupid decision that gets his partner killed. This will be the first of many stupid decisions that his character makes, so get used to it. There're a couple more people in the cast, but they actually matter so little that I'm not sure there'd be a point in listing them. All the characters here are essentially just pieces of a puzzle, or pawns in a game, with about as much real personality.
Like almost every episode of the Twilight Zone, Jigsaw's victims usually wake up in their predicament with no idea of how they got there, or why they were chosen. In the end, we're told who the killer was, but it's so arbitrary and the buildup to it is so ineptly handled that it doesn't really make any difference. As far as the plot of the movie goes, it would've been better handled if the identity of the killer wasn't revealed at all, and it stuck to the strong point: the puzzles. If this movie had a Jigsaw Killer that just went around and took jigsaw-puzzle-shaped pieces from his victims, it would've been a direct-to-video Steven Baldwin film. Instead, the puzzles make this film worth sitting through, and kick it (slightly) above the ranks of its kin. Since the characters aren't really fleshed-out, watching the movie is slightly like watching someone play an adventure-puzzle video game. You think logically along with the characters, but you don't emotionally connect to them. Still, the puzzles are fun, if disgusting, and I spent a long time trying to figure out what I'd do if I were in those situations.
Aside from the puzzle gimmick, the movie is probably deserving of all the hellfire blasts it's been getting from critics. The acting in the movie isn't exactly on the strong side, which may be the result of not having any rehearsals whatsoever (according to the IMDB entry). The characters are all a little crazy and inconsistent, and it's kind of a letdown when you know how good some of the actors can be. (Ever see Danny Glover in "Raisin in the Sun"?) The acting, plus the craptastic 'I'm really making a music video' 'edgy' 'hip' 'fun' 'gritty' style of the movie are the real killers. I suggest that the next time anyone in the world wants to make an 'edgy' 'hip' or 'gritty' film, they be forced to watch "The House on Haunted Hill" and "Thirteen Ghosts" and then flogged if they even attempt to recreate any effect used in either of those movies. And then flogged again just to help them forget that they watched them.
