a trite cliché with delusions of grandeur

Rating: 1/10 (2 July 2005)

SEVEN (or "se7en", whatever) was a really good film. The killer (Kevin Spacey) was presented in such a way as to challenge us, the audience, about what we really believed about the nature of good and evil, and the status of those concepts in our current society. His madness was affective (with an "a") because of the degree of method it involved. He was a smart guy who had really thought about what he was doing and honestly believed that he was right. That we could ~almost~ (that's the key) identify with him, made him all the scarier, and all the more thought-provoking.
Unlike seven, SAW is pure fluff. This movie has nothing of consequence to say about anything. It has pretensions of being in a similar vein as SEVEN, but any similarities between the two movies exist only at the most superficial level. It's like writing a harlequin romance in iambic pentameter and comparing it to Shakespeare.
The movie has all the typical elements of a provocative psychological thriller, but without any unifying principle to legitimate them. There are plenty of bizarre murders and plot twists, but in the end the only point behind any of it is gratuitous shock value. (Picture the filmmakers prodding you in the arm, saying "That was some pretty messed up sh*t, huh!?!?") I especially disliked the murder sequences that looked and sounded like Nine Inch Nails videos. It's works for about 2 1/2 seconds, at which point you ask yourself "what exactly is the point here anyway?".
Unlike Spacey's character in SEVEN, the serial killer in SAW is just some old guy who's angry at the world because he's dying of cancer. Thus he decides to punish people he feels are taking their healthy lives for granted, by coming up with twisted "games" in which they're forced to kill or mutilate themselves or others to remain alive, the "lesson" supposedly being that one should value one's own life over everything else, including the lives of others. In my opinion, this is a shallow nihilistic philosophy that's about as "profound" as Nazism. Overall, SAW is a pointless exploitation flick that is nowhere nearly as interesting as it pretends to be.
I have to admit that it's not entirely without craft (I have seen worse movies - WAY worse, in fact), but the end result I found to be primarily irritating for the simple reason that SAW DOES NOT DELIVER THE GOODS. If it didn't promise them in the first place, this would be okay, (I probably would have given it 5 or 6 stars), but as I have been arguing, that is not the case. I could overlook the plot holes and hackneyed genre conventions if the movie professed to be frivolous entertainment and nothing more. But it doesn't! It tries to pass itself off as a truly disturbing and "serious" film. If this is the criteria by which SAW is to be judged, it fails, miserably.