Originally posted 11/17/04
Saw
Director: James Wan
Writer: Leigh Whannell
Producers: Mark Burg, Gregg Hoffman, Oren Koules
Stars: Cary Elwes, Leigh Whannell, Danny Glover, Monica Potter
Something I both love and hate to do, after watching a movie about a serial killer who devises fiendish, sadistic killings and plays head games with his pursuers, is to ask myself: How exactly did the killer want things to unfold? And, given what is possible within the limits of the killer’s ability to plan, did the movie play fair?
Much of the action of Saw, an imaginatively grisly but ultimately sloppy and disappointing thriller, revolves around two men (Dr. Gordon, played by Cary Elwes, and Adam, played by writer Leigh Whannell) chained at opposite ends of a room. There are a few key props meant to help them understand what’s going on and possibly, possibly, escape their circumstances alive. They frequently have to toss the props (photographs, a small key, the titular cutting implement) back and forth across the room. If once, just once, a prop had say, landed out of reach in the middle of the room as the result of a bad toss, what would the killer have done? Would he reveal himself in order to retrieve the prop so his puppets could carry on his elaborate little game? Or would he let his whole plan go down the tubes because one of his victims can’t throw?
It doesn’t matter. Saw, heavily influenced by the superior Se7en, is like a sampler platter of the ghastly, a rough assemblage of variably intense and bloody vignettes that sometimes work in the moment, but become more and more frustrating as time rolls on and we realize that no explanation can make this movie’s contrivances hold water.
We open in the above-mentioned room, a grimy bathroom with a tub, a couple of toilets, and a corpse in the middle of the floor, gun clutched in hand next to a juicy-looking head wound. Dr. Gordon, emotionally constricted, trying to think clearly, explains that they’re most likely prisoners of the Jigsaw Killer, a psychopath who enjoys building elaborate imprisonment scenarios that invariably end with the victim causing their own mutilation. This time around, a tape-recorded message informs the Doctor that if he doesn’t murder total stranger Adam by 6 o’clock, his wife and daughter will be killed.
And just to add a pleasant twist, there are a pair of saws in the room; not strong enough to cut their chains, but plenty sturdy enough to cut off their feet. Clearly the Jigsaw Killer is a Mad Max fan.
Strangely, not one single time (and I thought back on this) do either of these men say anything about the choice Dr. Gordon has to make. If I were Adam, I would probably ask, at least once, if Dr. Gordon intended to really kill me or not, and maybe even (since I had a few hours) try and talk him out of it.
Even more strangely, they’re pretty lackadaisical in their observation of the ticking clock for which the killer has so kindly created such an ominous deadline. Instead, we get long scenes of low-wit stressed-out banter; and when they get tired of sniping and throwing props back and forth, they start reminiscing.
Then there’s a series of flashbacks which I imagine the filmmakers satisfy themselves by calling Rashomon-like, which would be fine, except that they are not. They’re just flashbacks delivered out of order. We watch examples of Jigsaw’s past work, a police detective (Danny Glover) whose investigation has become an unhealthy, unauthorized obsession, and moments from Dr. Gordon’s life before he became the latest victim. Ooverworked, arrogant, chilly towards his family and on the verge of an affair, he’s actually questioned as a suspect in the Jigsaw case.
It’s when we get to see the killer’s other handiwork that the movie shows off its greatest intensity. Director James Wan shot one of these mini-set-pieces as a demo in order to raise the financing for the picture. He shows admirable ingenuity with his dollars, the movie looks good for having so little to spend; and you can see why investors were impressed. In one vignette, a young woman (Shawnee Smith) wakes up with a nightmarish metal contraption locked around her head, and Jigsaw (who targets people he judges don’t significantly appreciate the gift of life) tells her that if she doesn’t unlock it before the timer dings, this “reverse bear trap” will tear off her jaw. Inconveniently, the only key is inside the stomach of someone lying in the corner.
Wan and Whannell deliver several variations on such gruesome survival dilemmas, and they are each creative in their way, although given the resources involved one must resign oneself to the fact that this stuff only takes place in the land of Movie Serial Killers. And Jigsaw’s got one mother of an Amex bill coming in the mail.
Clearly unrestrained by Wan, none of the actors enjoy their finest hours here – excepting maybe Smith, who makes the most of her time as the bear-trap’s would-be victim. Elwes in particular is disappointingly hammy and spends the movie’s final third in almost total exhausting hysterics. And Whanell’s incessant, snarky whininess reminds us that, while it is smart for young actors to write producible scripts with significant roles for themselves, they had better be talented enough to carry off those roles.
But really, you don’t come here for the acting. You come here for ominous soundtrack groans, and squirts of blood, and wicked surprises that leave people suddenly very, very dead. Saw provides a fair share of that, executed with energy and competence on a moment by moment basis. But if you start asking how, for example, the Killer knew that, were he ever chased by cops down a certain corridor, he’d be chased in that direction; or why a cop would actually invite his prime suspect in a murder case to watch a statement being made by the killer’s one survivor, the whole thing will end up making you feel worse in your stomach than that poor sap with the key.