It's different, and watchable because of it

Rating: 8/10 (14 March 2005)

I will admit I have spent the past ten years or so developing a healthy intolerance for the modern thriller/horror movie. Gone are the days of movies like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (I'm talking about the original here) where we never actually saw Leatherface run the chainsaw through any of his victims... the true horrors were left to our imagination, the scariest place of all. No, it's all been replaced with buckets of fake blood and CGI heads exploding or whatever in the name of "realism".
So it's a pleasure to finally come across a movie that actually has the ability to creep into your mind and tell you something, staying with you after the credits begin rolling, rather than cheating you out of the admission fee by hacking up random bystanders for the sake of gore.
As a movie, Saw covers little or no new ground but it teaches us chilling lessons about ourselves, about life, about other people around us and how what we do with our lives will eventually come back to face us one way or another. You don't get that from your average serial killer movie; not even those that supposedly develop the character of the killer and make you feel like there might be a method behind his madness. The motives of "the Jigsaw killer" are out in plain view; his victims are punished for disrespecting their own lives by being placed in situations where they must endure the worst just to get out. In doing so, they find a new appreciation for the life that they have... at least, that's the idea.
The greatest thing about Saw is the way the story all comes together at the end. Of course, I'm not going to spoil it by revealing any details but even if you, like I did, find the first half of the movie laborious and the acting by most of the cast teetering on B-movie quality, there are no plot holes left and nothing but a very real sense of knowing exactly why it all happened the way it did.
Saw is not mind-blowingly brilliant, but it goes in a very different direction to every other piece of trash Hollywood has turned out lately with the tag "thriller" or "horror"... and for that reason alone, I found it worth the skepticism I swallowed when I finally decided to rent the DVD after purposely missing the cinematic release.
Watch this movie expecting to be thinking about it - and yourself - long after it's over.