MOVIE REVIEW: SAW (2 OUT OF 10)
The horror genre has yet another reject with the upcoming release of James Wan’s debut film, Saw. It’s painfully obvious that this is his first time in the director’s chair. He is unable to go anywhere interesting with a truly original premise, and although Saw has been marketed as a thriller, it plays out better as a comedy.
The setup is similar in style to Vincenzo Natali’s far superior 1997 film, Cube. Strangers wake up captive in an unfamiliar setting with unknown forces working to kill them. With time running out, they are left to figure out how to escape.
Natali works within the genre of science fiction in his movie and utilizes a cast of well-drawn characters to create a compelling story of survival in the face of seemingly impossible odds. Wan, on the other hand, is in it for the cheap thrills.
In the case of Saw, the audience is presented with a great idea that could have been flushed out into an amazing horror film. Two strangers, Adam (Leigh Whannell) and Dr. Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes), wake up shackled to opposite sides of a seedy room with an atmosphere reminiscent of David Fincher’s Seven. In the middle of the room is a dead body lying in a pool of blood with a gun in one hand and a tape recorder in the other. They are told through an audiotape from the killer known as “Jigsaw” that Dr. Gordon is to kill Adam before such and such a time or else his daughter and wife will be killed. In order to free themselves from their bonds, they are each provided with a handsaw capable of cutting through flesh and bone.
Sounds awesome, doesn’t it?
Far from it—very far. The intensity of the first five minutes is lost completely once Wan leaves the room and begins to jump back and forth between melodramatic flashbacks and a pointless sub-plot involving Detective David Tapp (Danny Glover) who is relentless in his hunt for “Jigsaw.”
Aside from the meandering plotline, sporadic pacing, music video style cinematography, and terrible acting there is the soundtrack, which is a direct rip-off of Angelo Badalamenti’s scores for many of David Lynch’s films. Not that this is a bad thing because it definitely is the high point of the movie. In a recent interview with IGN Filmforce, Wan even cited the work of Lynch as an inspiration for the film. There were no truly horrific moments, and the ones that were meant invoke chills only managed to fill the theatre with hysterical laughter. Lynch is a far superior director and can manage to make a close-up of a coffee maker seem like the most threatening thing in the world (see Mulholland Drive). With this story, Wan has much more to work with than a coffee maker yet he manages to make a terrible picture that is far from scary.
He should have just focused on what was truly frightening in the story and that is the situation between the two men in the room. That is what made Cube such a success. It never once tried to give a reason as to why the people are there. It left everything to the imagination. Saw leaves absolutely nothing to the imagination. The ads claim that this is the “most terrifying film of the year” and they’re right. It’s terrifying that they actually wasted money and resources on this piece of cinematic garbage.
