Saw, a grisly horror flick directed by Australian newbie James Wan and starring Cary Elwes and Leigh Whannel, is an exercise in bad taste and cheap scares. In it, Dr. Lawrence Gordon (Elwes) and a guy named Adam (Whannel) wake up to find themselves chained to the wall in a nasty bathroom with a dead body between them and no escape. Together they realize that they're about to be the latest victims of the serial killer known as "Jigsaw." The murderer who doesn't actually murder, Jigsaw likes to let his victims kill themselves and/or one another by the most disgusting means possible. Like Kevin Spacey's character in the movie Se7en, Jigsaw is something of a moralist, and he selects his victims based on what he perceives to be the failures in their lives. He provides them an escape option that forces them to confront these personal shortcomings, but gives them only two hours to make it out alive. Unlike Spacey in Se7en, though, Jigsaw is preachy, and comes off as a haranguer and a bully. He has no motive--biblical, plausible, or otherwise--and so unlike in Se7en where the jerks get what they deserve in a cool way, the victims in Saw ought to elicit our pity.
Yet they don't. Dr. Gordon is an unethical doctor and a bad husband and father, and if he doesn't kill Adam within two hours, Jigsaw is going to kill his family. Cary Elwes, what happened to your career? Remember Robin Hood: Men in Tights? Remember (one of my all-time favorite movies) The Crush? In Saw, Elwes had to put on an unfortunate thirty-five pounds for a role that wasn't worth getting out of bed for, and his performance was lame. While his wife, played by Monica Potter, works on freeing herself and her daughter from Jigsaw's clutches, Dr. Gordon pines away in a bathroom somewhere, too chicken to kill Adam and too dumb to escape.
Adam's role is another problem altogether. Jigsaw's reasons for holding him captive are sketchy at best, and he is not provided an escape option like Dr. Gordon. It seems as though he's just a vehicle for Dr. Gordon's self-actualization; isn't Jigsaw supposed to have a methodology? Plot-holes like this one abounded, and were too salient to pass unnoticed.
The good scenes were the ones that depicted the deaths of other victims of Jigsaw's madness, like the fat man who cut himself good in a cage full of barbed wire. Unfortunately, just when things are getting freaky, the director overdoes it by spinning the camera around faster and faster until you're more physically nauseated than creeped out. There were, however, a couple scenes (one involving a tripwire and shotguns) that really hit the spot.
In general, the movie was laughable at best. But there really was something comical about the way a scene of intense struggle would cut straight to pathetic Dr. Gordon, sitting sadly next to a broken urinal. Not even Danny Glover as an obsessive ex-cop was able to save this movie, though his performance was nothing to write home about, either. All in all, don't waste your money ... until Saw 2, which is now in production and is rumored to be starring his holiness Eminem, hits theaters sometime next year.
