Let's travel back in time

Rating: 7/10 (19 March 2015)

It's 2004. We've just seen off three great horror franchises in the space of a few years with Scream wrapping up (until it didn't) and Freddy vs Jason bringing an end to both the Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street film series'. Stepping into that vacuum come two Australians: Director James Whan and writer/ actor Leigh Wannell armed with an idea.
Two men, Dr Gordon (Cary Elwes), and Adam (Leigh Whannell) awake on opposite sides of a room, chained by the leg to pipes, with a dead body in the middle. Gordon plays a tape saying someone has his family and telling him he has one day to kill Adam and he can leave and his family will be safe.
Gordon quickly works out that they are playing a game set by a serial killer given the name Jigsaw by the press, who tries to teach people life lessons by putting them in situation they will more than likely die in. We are asked to buy into the idea that Jigsaw "never killed anybody." Well sorry to rain on your parade, but if you recklessly endanger someone's life or show depraved indifference, yep you're a murderer. And the rules are hardly consistent. For instance one woman survives a trap by stabbing a man to death and cutting out one of his organs to retrieve a key. Wonder what his game was supposed to be? "If you're hearing this it's because a girl's head just exploded when she decided not to stab you to death and mutilate your lifeless body. Now we're going to play a game...." When some traps have multiple people all with an opportunity to survive and others are "Kill or die" you can make no claims to fairness. Jigsaw being a killer who doesn't kill is an interesting idea, but doesn't quite work, both because the writers are not consistent with what Jigsaw is about and because he is clearly a murderer.
Anyway, Danny Glover plays a grizzled cop who believes Goodman is Jigsaw. He lost a partner to this killer and will stop at nothing to find and stop Jigsaw. The script effectively takes us back and forth between the two guys in a room and the crazy cop. This would become the structure of each of the seven Saw films, focusing on one elaborate trap involving multiple people and a police investigation. At least in this one these two plots are connected, which is not the case in some of the later films. In the meantime, Goodman and Adam sit in the cell trying to work out how they both got into this mess and how they are going to get out.
We see one of the worst and unconvincing car chase scenes ever put to film, we see holes in the plot the size of Texas, and we see Gordon saw his leg off (maybe that's why it's called Saw?). At the very end we get the "twist" that Jigsaw is what we thought was a dead body in the middle of the room. The key to the chains holding Adam was in the bathtub he woke up in at the start, and has been lost down the drain. Meaning that his lesson was to not freak out and get up when he wakes up in a bath with a chain on his leg. Game Over, Jigsaw says as he slams the door shut, leaving Adam in there to starve to death. This succeeds in being surprising, but fails in being another "game" with no point and no way of winning and also in being absolutely ridiculous.
Saw is an entertaining little film, that requires the viewer to not ask questions, perpetually suspend their disbelief and just go with it. The veterans give disappointing performances, particularly Elwes, and Whannell is clearly a better writer than actor. The effects are cheap, but only the car chase is laughable. Saw was a unique and original film that grew first into a passable trilogy and then into a seven film orgy of torture porn and stupidity. In many ways, this one deserves to be separated from the rest of the series. Saw, at least, can stand as a decent film on its own based on a unique, if flawed, idea and you don't need the later chapters to appreciate it.