Scary? Intelligent? Oh please..

Rating: 3/10 (2 April 2005)

I bought into the hype and watched "Saw" last night. And afterward it left me with a feeling that I would have been better off flushing my money in the toilet. It started out very promising and with what I thought was a great chilly feel to it, then suddenly took a turn for the worse when it wanted to be smart as well. In my opinion "Saw" tries to be as cruel, scary and intelligent as "Se7en" but fails miserably - it seems to me someone had a great idea for an overall plot but decided to film it before thinking it through. There are too many of the little "diabolic" subplots which are just completely ridiculous and unbelievable - completely destroying the film.
Two people are chained to the spot in a small room. No more than six feet from either of them a body is lying in a pool of blood. It's not a dead body though. Nooo. It's the evil mastermind pretending to be dead; nobody notices a thing for 7-8 hours after which he gives himself away on purpose. That's one thing. Another is my lack of understanding as to what the villain's motivations for doing it were? How about those electrocutions? Current flows through a chain attached to your ankle and from there to ground, hurting you. Fine. But when the other end of the chain is attached to a pipe that comes out of the ground as well? Even my sister understands electrical potentials better than that.
But the best thing really is the scene where the cops have the bad guy cornered. Luckily for the bad guy, he's got a hostage strapped to a chair in an evil contraption - in which two power drills advance on rails towards the helpless hostage's head. Yeah okay when put into writing it does sound a little ridiculous. But it's not. Not compared to the moment when the bad guy trips the switch for the machine to start in order to force the cops to choose: Save the hostage or catch the villain? And the cops are indecisive. Unable to instantly figure out what to do. Panicking and ultimately letting their antagonist get away. Not....... the power drills! Please no! There are two power drills quite slowly closing in on someone's immobilized head. Two cops armed with shotguns are standing ten feet away. Damn what a tight spot. Come on.
I'm sorry. But this film is a complete waste of time. The only reason that it gets a 3 vote from me is because I thought it built rather well in the beginning.