Saw (2004)
Furor thought much of this Premise: 4/5
Funk tolerated it on his Premisis: 3/5
She SAW, but she's not telling.
Two men (Cary Elwes and young actor/writer Leigh Whannell) wake up in a forlorn, disused bathroom. They are startled to find themselves chained to the wall and to see the room’s 3rd occupant, a suicide victim. Eventually they find a tape recorder with a message for each of them: this is a game of survival which they can only escape by sawing a foot off and killing the other player over the next several hours. Exposition comes to us by Elwes’s character, Doctor Gordon, who has heard of Jigsaw, a “serial killer” (‘homicidal performance artist’ is less tired) whose lethal traps are intended to teach his victims the value of life. These puzzlebox punishments certainly succeed in the rare instance when they don’t kill the victims outright, which marks one of the first Frisbee-sized plotholes to be found throughout the film.
Time passes and we’re also introduced to a grizzled cop (Danny Glover) who’s, you guessed it, obsessed with catching Jigsaw, and Doctor Gordon’s kidnapped wife and child. It’s a race to the finish as this fine concept rapidly degenerates into every cop movie cliche’ while earnestly maintaining that it’s a blood relation of ‘Se7en.’
Rev. Funk rejects the Cast and its works: 2/5
Furor chants hatefully in accord: 2/5
The 5 people mentioned above comprise a full third of the cast. This mimimalist setup would have worked much better had Elwes and Glover been able to give more than blah performances from their characters’ goofy constraints. Glover looks the part but is soon forced to play an unconvincing Crazy Cop, while Cary Elwes’s unlikable doctor only alternates between looking confused and deep in thought. Sure, a significant part of his role involves being chained to a wall, but we blame the director for failing to get better performances out of these two great actors on his bullet-train schedule, and more so the writer for cramming them into go-nowhere archetypes. As an aside, actor Tobin Bell gets some screen time, and it’s good to see him since he acted very capably in an X-Files episode. Moreover, Saw’s dialogue is enigmatic throughout, as you’ll continually ask yourself if that’s something YOU’D say if YOU woke up chained to a wall. Look at you. You want examples. Okay. The movie’s first lines are “Help! Someone help me! Is someone there? Hey! Oh shit, I’m probably dead.” How about this exchange: “What’s your name?” “My name is Very Fucking Confused; what’s your name?” Or a grimly-voiced: “This is the most fun I’ve had without lubricant.” Yeah, it’s forgivable in a writer this young, and dare I say, ex-TREME, but if one of the characters bled from the eyeballs and blurted ‘I wanna make out with Eddie Deezen!’ it’d be just as sequitur as what we hear.
Furor raved ‘Ehhhh!’ for the FX and Cinematics: 3/5
Funk fought to curb similar praise: 3/5
The facts: low budget; originally intended for straight-to-video; shot in 18 days with no rehearsals. The writer and director are admittedly very resourceful in enacting their winning premise, as seen in many of the original, disturbing visuals. For example, Funk’s favorite device that the killer makes is the jaw-ripping ‘helmet’. It looks like it is made out of junk, yet is still functional, which makes it all the more menacing. It is the sort of contraption that would be spawned by the nightmares of an orthodontist’s teenaged patient. Furor’s pick for visuals is a shot of the killer briefly illumined by photography flash in near-total darkness, then lunging at the viewer. World of Darkness served chilled, baby!
However, poorly-shot scenes abound, with a camera that is either one step behind the action or focusing on some insignificant part of the scene. The movie really LOOKS like it only took the 2 1/2 weeks to shoot that it did. Funk speculates that at least six of those days were spent reading the manual for the camera, while Furor takes to his usual rant about scripts that depend heavily on sound ending up mangled into muttering by a director’s poor sound clarity. Even on DVD, important lines are murky when they can be deciphered at all. Remember when you tried to pick up a girl and “How about we mmmrrph mmmphh mmmurph” didn’t get the message across? It doesn’t here, either.
Here’s the main bone to pick, though. Vibrating heads. Director James Wan loves ‘em. He loves nothing more than to set a head all a-flutter whenever frantic action is called for. Vibrate them in cages! Vibrate them in cars! Vibrate your way clean through transitions! This guy watched way too much MTV. Back when, you know. The videos were on. With all the shaking heads in ‘em. That said, the soundtrack is excellent, especially the truly memorable ending crescendo capped off with Fear Factory’s single, ‘Bite the Hand that Bleeds You’. Heartfelt screaming all around, too.
Funk finds the Popcorn rancid: 2/5
Furor also spurns said Popcorn: 2/5
We’re, like, angry. At a movie. The only thing ‘Saw’ has going for it are the elaborate, unscary traps the killer uses on his victims. The pacing botches all that lovely existential/psychological potential (see ‘Cube’) into dull hallway-and-boiler room chases; any suspense you may feel is soon forgotten as the remorseless, pauseless pacing shoves interesting puzzles and conflicts aside in favor of the next development. The action cliche’s openly question why some people even HAVE guns. As with so many of these movies, many elements exist just to childishly confound you as to who the killer is. By the way, it’s NOT THAT ONE GUY!!
Ignore the hype and say Naw to Saw.