Not worth watching

Rating: 1/10 (15 October 2015)

This is supposed to be a thriller/horror movie that is meant to keep you on the edge, have you biting your finger nails, and forgetting to eat your pop corn.
However the methods used to elicit this response from the audience are barbaric. Do you enjoy seeing women and children maimed and tortured by warlords in Africa? Do you enjoy seeing burn victims at the ER? If you are such a sick psycho then maybe you will enjoy this film.
Some people have commented on Saw's genius setting up elaborate puzzles. Except of course that Saw has all the time in the world to prepare/research/set up his gruesome "puzzles" whereas the victims have minutes sometimes seconds and their hands tied.
The usual clichés are necessary to keep the film going. The bad guy will not ever be caught or stopped , the bullets will miss, the good guys will hesitate and ignore obvious danger signs, time and time again, to give him the time to escape. The good guys will also behave irrationally repeatedly, again, to offer the bad guy the chance to escape.
Another typical cliché is that the good guys AR not what they seem and have done something bad in their past that is revealed half way through the film. And that somehow means that the sociopath killer has some moral basis for sticking a gun to a little girl's head or blowing the victims up? I do not think so.
A very common theme which becomes boringly predictable is the main characters/victims having to play the (sick) games set up by Saw even when they do not need to. If a sick sociopath with a history of dozens of murders has kidnapped your son, how many of his fingers would you break to force him to reveal the location? One? Two? I think I would cut him into a thousand pieces. But predictably in the movie the good guy falls victim to yet another trap. In the TV series "24" we saw more believable ways of forcing fanatics to reveal the truth.
Naked, this film is a horror flick where after 90 minutes we expect to see body parts strewn all over the screen in various sadistic traps and self mutilation arising from self preservation and/or duress. It is sick and cheap, it has no value and no elegance. It is like someone asking you to cut your own hand off or remove one of your eyes so that he does not shoot you or your child. Similar kinds of torture took place in Iraq and Africa but we do not celebrate them by making films.
The material is plentiful. Ideas for sadism and torture are easy to invent, and dress up in elaborate puzzles. "solve this puzzle which involves chopping your leg off or I will explode a bomb at your child's school". Terrible and sad.