Negative review, No Spoilers, See the film only if it will save a life.

Rating: 1/10 (28 October 2004)

Please pass this review on before Friday and hopefully prevent mass suicides and psychotic breaks in fans who have been looking forward to this film.
By all that is holy if you have not seen the complete piece of over-hyped crap that is SAW save your eyes and mind the torture and never, NEVER see it. This will be the movie people will pass around as a gag gift in a few years. It is the morning after I caught a much anticipated sneak preview and I find myself more p***ed and disgusted than disappointed in the film. Jon Favreau noted on Dinner for Five once that you can take a chance on the script, the director or the lead actor in a project and still have things turn out all right. So we have a first time director, first time screenwriter ( he is also in the film and gives himself the only cool line in the entire movie) and Cary Elwes. 3 strikes and you are out. The thing that p***es me off is that the story is good. The base idea behind this film, a guy who gets his victims to kill themselves in a variety of horrible ways. Definitely up there with Se7en, wait a minute, that was the story from Se7en, so never mind. By the end of the film you WANT every one to die horribly just so that it will end.
A previous review commented on an overly giggly audience, they were laughing because this should have been a comedy. Not a single moment of the film was scary or even creepy. All of those scenes were telegraphed horribly and executed with boxing gloves on. There are simply no spoilers to give away. Danny Glover tried but he had nothing to work with, not sure why there were even police in the story line as they provided no advancement of the plot, and didn't even provide any interesting death scenes in their search for the killer. Dina Meyer has all of 3 or 4 lines and never even takes off her clothes, which could have redeemed to film somewhat. Monica Potter is the best performance of the film and that because I think the confusion and anger that her character showed so well on film was drawn from her own emotions at being connected with this project. Cary Elwes should never be allowed to work on any film, anywhere, ever again. I would have rather seen Jake Lloyd or Hayden Christiansen play the role because they could have given better performances. There was also none of the grisly violence that was promised, I think they either showed a different cut to get the R rating or they paid to get it. "Shaun of the Dead" was a more grisly, horrific and scary film and they were TRYING to be funny. This not only deserves no starts on any reviewers scale it deserves to be the baseline of a whole new scale of just how bad a movie can be. I give it 5 out of 5 thrown handfuls of monkey excrement. In the immortal words of J. Jonah Jameson, "Crap. Crap. MEGACRAP! Save someone's life and print this review. I know I came close to suicide.
"The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible." --Albert Einstein (1879-1955) -except for how this movie ever got released.