Needed sharpening

Rating: 2/10 (6 April 2008)

I found this movie impossible to watch all the way through  not for being too frightening but for being too dumb. It was one of several so-called "torture porn" movies I made a point of watching to understand what the genre consisted of, and after watching them I understood it less than before: they weren't all alike, Saw was the only one the label seemed possibly to fit, by one of the two competing definitions in my head. Where I got either from or whether I just inferred them both I don't know, but if the term doesn't mean one or the other I don't know what it could mean. Definition number one is: a movie that uses torture scenes as porn, that is, to gratify the audience erotically; definition number two is: a movie that uses torture scenes in place of porn, so that they comprise its entire content, or reason for being. Saw may meet the second definition, if one supposes, as one easily might, that it exists mainly as an excuse to describe and illustrate the ordeals the movie's maniac puts his victims through. These are all on the level of a gross-out game played by thirteen-year-old boys  what if I sewed up piranhas in your stomach and I sewed up a bottle of piranha poison in one of your sister's arms or legs but you didn't know which one so you had to cut them all off and then she'd bleed to death or else the piranhas would eat your stomach and you'd die? Not only the maniac's schemes but everything he does, and everything the cops after him does, are on the same level of head-pounding stupidity, and this is what makes the movie unendurable.
But the strange thing is that this nonsense, while taking up most of the screen time, isn't the main story: it's the _filler_. The main story is about two guys trapped in a basement in a him-or-me situation that seems as if it can only end in violence and the death of one or the other: in essence a Grande Guignol one-act; and it isn't bad at all. Rewritten and improved, probably by a different hand, it could have been very good indeed. The drama between the characters, the increasing tension of their situation, the suspense of their efforts to escape could have made a good, tense half-hour film or TV episode. But obviously it wouldn't be enough to fill out a ninety-minute movie, and so the rest of it is padded with the cops-and-loony story alluded to above. The director is too flashy and too little focused to build an atmosphere of suspense or fear (to see what's missing  and limiting the comparison to movies with similar subjects  refer to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Creep), and so the movie becomes depressing, because in the absence of fear or any other emotion it's just depressing to watch people struggling through paths of barbed wire, broken glass, &c., or to watch a child terrorized. However, I have a feeling the guys who made this movie and the guys who like it view the ability to enjoy such things vicariously as a proof of maleness, and that in fact the existence of a movie like this owes less to the splatter tradition than to Chuck Palahniuk (whom guys read to show they're man enough to). At cross-purposes, then, I and they: because I'd rather the culture I inhabit be not as of thirteen-year-old boys.
Or thirteen-year-old men.