A case of style over substance that can't overcome

Rating: 5/10 (23 December 2004)

Settling into the Halloween mini-fright fest season is the grisly "Saw." Penned as a psychological thriller more akin to "Silence of the Lambs" and "Seven" than to modern day slasher flicks and Japanese influenced horrors, the stylish and dark movie tries to measure up to its influences. Though it abounds with adept creepiness and plenty of serial murder terrors, "Saw" fails to join the ranks of the memorable aforementioned thrillers. Awkward acting, jumpy edits, and a trifle too many open ends in the plot lines leave this mainstream horror film more gross than great.
"Saw" opens promisingly. A man awakes in a freezing bathtub in a dingy room with two other men. One as we find out is a doctor (Elwes) and the other is a corpse holding a tape recorder containing cryptic messages. To the men's terror, they are captives of a known serial killer who prefers to let his victims kill themselves (in horrific ways) than do the honors himself. What emerges is an orchestrated game of survival in which the pawns must perform acts of violence to save themselves and those whom they hold dear.
What begins as a game of Clue come to life disintegrates into a mishmash of forced flashbacks held together by sub-par acting. Even veterans like Danny Glover seem to be fighting to hold together a script which is big on technical quirks, but low on dialogue. The interactions between Whannell and Elwes (which make up the majority of the movie) are almost silly at times and ham-fisted at best. The movie is downright boring for stretches and significant discoveries made in the prison room often fail to elicit the correct response. The pounding climax and ending is a mixed bag of visceral cool and baffling open-endedness.
On a positive note, the dark atmosphere of "Saw" lends enough creepiness to make it a worthwhile movie experience. The murderer makes brief appearances in grotesque masks and dots the landscape with his sadistic devices. The modes of self-mutilation and murder he subjects his victims to are sadly more inventive than the film as a whole. Danger lurks around every steel curved corner and booby-trapped door as heavy breathing and heartbeats dot the score.
On a whole, the film's greatest weakness is its failure to connect with the viewer. "Seven" featured not only a complex villain, but characters whom you could empathize with and track their moves with tension. "The Silence of the Lambs" offered two stellar actors lending a complexity and chemistry which had been rare in a dark thriller of its kind. The characters of "Saw" are too conventional, weak, or vague to truly elicit a response. Even the killer's grand purpose is obscured by a tendency to see past the viability of characters involved, unlike the twisted truth which could be seen in John Doe's work in "Seven."
Perhaps it was not meant to be placed on the level of those films in the pantheon of the dark thriller. Yet the grandness of its vision and poor execution leaves "Saw" a lightly entertaining movie that never really was.