trying to unsee what i Saw (haw haw)

Rating: 1/10 (18 April 2005)

There are some actors who are terrific no matter who's directing them. (Paul Bettany, Denzel Washington) There are others who are irredeemably awful in absolutely anything (Ryan O'Neal comes to mind). And then there are guys like Cary Elwes. He was dynamite in The Princess Bride, every bit as swashbuckling and fun to watch as Errol Flynn. He shines in ensemble pieces; equally convincing as the desperately manipulative Thomas H. Ince in Peter Bogdanovich's pathetically under-seen The Cat's Meow and as a fat, balding, prissy theater producer in Cradle Will Rock. Of course, it helps that all these are good movies, which the generic horror flick Saw is not.
Not that it doesn't try. It's got that grinding, industrial-metal soundtrack, to get us all edgy when the film itself cannot. It's got those hyper-motion quickcuts, the same kind used in the remake of Thirteen Ghosts, which at least knew how lame it was, and was thus easier to take, with tongue firmly in cheek. Perhaps using the gore factor (which there isn't much of; Shaun of the Dead was gorier than this) to patch up some gaping, 747-size holes in the plot, Saw cheerfully telegraphs the shock moments, using some halfway-clever plot twists that almost make sense at the time but on second thoughtwhat a mess.
Anyway, here's the set-up: A kid named Adam (Leigh Whannell, who wrote the script) wakes up in a nasty old bathroom chained to a huge pipe in the wall. Opposite him is Dr. Lawrence Gordon (Elwes), similarly chained and even more confused. Between them lay a dead man, his head apparently half-blown away, holding a gun in one hand and a tape recorder in the other. It's all revealed to be the work of the "Jigsaw Killer," who devises unique life-or-death scenarios for unsuspecting, flawed folk to work their way out of or die. (Set this in a giant, three-dimensional Rubik's Cube, and you have the much more intriguing Cube; set it in another unnamed city with Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman hunting a deranged Bible-nut, you get Se7enWhannell has obviously seen and studied them both).
So Adam and Dr. Gordon are trapped together, for reasons that are calmly explained away in a series of flashbacks. The goal: Gordon must kill Adam with whatever implements are at hand or else his wife and daughter will buy the farm. And yes, in a toilet stall they find a couple of hacksaws.
Nothing is what it seems, of course, and I have to report that I saw the final denouement coming from the first twenty minutes. The enigmatic "Jigsaw Killer" is a lot like the alien race out to destroy humanity in Independence Day: faceless and just plain bad, bad, bad! Kevin Spacey's genuinely chilling John Doe from Se7en may have been a fairly one-note character, but at least we were given reasons for his psychosisand what's more, we believed them. Saw's killer is given a perfunctory motivation, but it all rings as off-key as the acting.
First-time director James Wan wastes Danny Glover as a cop obsessed with the case, and his demise is a complete let-down. He delivers some nice, gruesome moments, but since I saw (pun not really intended) them coming, they're not much more than Pavlovian audience buzzers. Judging by the general crowd reaction, Saw will get plenty of word of mouth help from the high school set, make a nice, tidy little profit, and since a sequel has already been announced, old Jigsaw will likely be around torturing people for no apparent reason for some time.