Are you quite Saw?

Rating: 1/10 (21 June 2014)

Whenever I write a review my conscience tells me to think of all the talented people who put so much time and effort into their project. "Be fair" I hear it say. On the other hand, thinking of the readers of these reviews, there are times when a dose of brutal honesty is the only option.
Director James Wan and actor Leigh Wannell co-wrote Saw, therefore they have to accept the burden of culpability for what I can only describe as one of the worst films I have ever seen. This is quite remarkable considering that the opening denouement promises so much as we find Mr Wannell waking up to a living nightmare. He and fellow actor Cary Elwes find themselves chained by the ankles on either side of what can only be described as the bathroom from Hell with what is presumably a dead body between them. The only clean object is a clock on the wall. Ticking. We look forward to a psychological drama...
...what we get instead is a convoluted story centred on a character known as Jigsaw, a sadistic evildoer who gives his victims the chance of life if they are willing to sacrifice others. This is explained to us via flashbacks... lots of flashbacks. This gives us the opportunity to see Ken Leung as Detective Sing and his partner Danny Glover as Detective Tapp in a double act straight from the Lethal Weapon school of acting - which is actually remarkably good compared with our two leads trapped in the bathroom who are gradually running through every emotional gamut in an effort to convince us of... What? Well, this is where the problem lies. We have spent one fifth of the running time trying to establish characters, plot, development, direction. We have nothing. Mr Elwes, playing the part of a surgeon and Mr Wannell as a down-at-heel photographer have both tried tension-breaking comedic, breaking-down emotional and shouty. We shall leave them for a while as they bond, fall out, solve clues, fail miserably to escape before their deadline etc. Meanwhile we can continue with the flashbacks and find out just how easy it is for our two inept detectives to bond, solve clues and go after the homicidal maniac all on their own...
Oh by the way, did I mention Zep, the rather sinister hospital orderly, or John, Dr. Gordon's patient with an inoperable frontal lobe tumour. How about the good doctor's wife Alison and daughter Diana? Well they all pop up in the inevitable flashbacks. Eventually everybody, doctor,wife, daughter, policeman who is still alive, photographer, patient, extremely patient reviewer get together in a Grand Guignol finish... Oh sorry - you want me to save one-hundred minutes of your life? Here goes. Doctor has to kill photographer by six o'clock in order to save his wife and daughter who are being held by orderly who has been poisoned by maniac who will only give him antidote if he kills doctor's wife and daughter. Detective, who went insane after maniac killed his partner, is paying photographer to follow doctor who he thinks is maniac. Orderly fails to follow through due to not tying doctor's wife properly, detective arrives, fights orderly, speeded-up car chase a la Keystone Kops - no idea why. Both end up in the sewers, detective dies. Doctor loses concentration, realises it is now gone six. saws through his own ankle, shoots photographer but fails to kill him. Drags himself out of bathroom. Reviewer loses concentration. What we thought was a dead body in the bathroom turns out to be patient John aka Jigsaw who gets up and kindly tells photographer that key to padlock is in bath - same bath that photographer emptied of water at beginning of film thus leaving him trapped there. John/Jigsaw leaves.
To sum up: a film with sadistic overtones, poor acting, what we can only presume to be an unfinished script, ludicrous plot and loose ends inevitably leading to sequels which, fortunately for all of us I shall not be either viewing or reviewing.
Whilst IMDb offer no clues as to the ages of reviewers I feel fairly confident in declaring that most of the people who give this film a vote of seven or more would be below thirty. It would be interesting to see what would happen if they all came back in twenty years and revised their votes...