Saw
See also:
Saw II (Uncle Cliff)
It's fun to sit here behind the anonymity of the Internet, and a pseudonym (that's right friends, I was actually not christened Uncle Cliff), and fire shots at the big dumb Hollywood blockbuster machine. Hey, anything that pumps that much money so often into something with seemingly such little thought is an open (albeit easy) target in my book. Take that Star Wars. Cop that Batman Begins. You wanna bit of this, Return of the King, huh, do ya bitch??? Ahhhh, that's better.
It's another thing altogether to sit here and sink a low-budget film made by two local boys who, through a lot of hard work, struck it rich with their heavily Seven and Cube influenced serial killer idea, Saw. So I will try and focus on the positive instead.
Writer/star Leigh Whannell and director James Wan came up with an idea that could be made dirt cheap, cheap enough to give them total control, in a genre notorious for having fans latch onto films regardless of budget constraints (see Evil Dead for further reading). Very clever. You can see what little money they had (the car chase scene for instance looks like a stationary car being shaken – and it is), but that they still achieved a professional look is a tribute to their cunning and smarts, and they deserve the chance at the Hollywood big-time that this film has given them. But while I stand to applaud the merits of their idea and their plan, unfortunately I can't muster up equal enthusiasm for the film itself.
Familiar with their story and taking all the restraints they must have faced into consideration I still feel that my criticisms of Saw go to Whannell's script. While belting out a kick-ass idea of a killer that never actually kills, but rather sets up perfect strangers in situations where they have to kill each other (or themselves), the film never really comes good on this promise. The tension in the room the two strangers awake in is bountiful, but it seems they could not hope to sustain it, as they keep cutting away to less than engaging flashbacks to the killer's other crimes and the detectives that are pursuing him. Other ideas are also only half-baked throughout. Why is he 'The Jigsaw Killer'? They say it's because he pointlessly leaves a jigsaw piece at each crime scene, but really its just so they can pretend to have two reasons to call the film Saw. Also, the motive of the killer shows their pretensions of introducing a Seven-type moralistic killer, but that's never followed through on much either (killing people because they don't fully appreciate their lives? That's pretty damn indiscriminate. Where would he stop?). The performances for the most part feel like the one-take shots they probably were, but you don't watch these kinds of films for the acting I guess. Oh and also…
Okay, wait, I was going to try and focus on the positives, wasn't I?
The ending is great, a nice twist that I would have probably seen coming if I wasn't so bored by everything outside the room and switched off completely. I also made the mistake of underestimating these guys, and bit their red herring hook line and sinker, thinking to myself, "You dumbasses, we know the killer has to be the only other person we've heard dialogue from," only to be shown that it was my ass that was dumb. Well, I won't underestimate them again. They've got a much bigger budget this next time round, so expect me to be unforgiving as I sit back, fasten my knives, and wait for them to slip up and show if they have become part of the machine too.