And I thought the slow-motion flying flesh of The Passion of the Mel was sadistic. It’s Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo placed alongside James Wan’s grizzly Saw.
Adam (Leigh Wannell) and Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes) wake up chained to the wall on opposite sides of a decrepit washroom. Between them is the body of a dead man with his brains strewn all over the tiled floor. So begins the puzzle of their escape. They are victims of a serial killer of sorts known to the police as Jigsaw. However it’s tough to call someone a serial killer when they haven’t actually ever killed someone. Jigsaw keeps his hands clean by making his victims kill themselves or each other. He simply acts as the sick bastard who facilitates their deaths. As Adam and Lawrence try to figure out how to escape without bloodshed, they talk and bond over stories of Jigsaw’s past victims. There’s the girl who wakes up with a contraption stuck to her head that will blow her apart if she does not retrieve the key to its lock from a live man’s stomach. There’s others too, but half the fun (if one could call it that) is seeing Wan continue to try to top himself as the most sadistic mother working in movies not named Takeshi Miike.
Saw plays out as though it were the brainchild of a drunken Friday-night epiphany. It’s clever and grisly torture after clever and grisly torture, all of which have a certain zing shown in isolation from one another and from the rest of the far-fetched plot. It amounts to a gimmick movie, though, that looks good in its separate parts but ends up as something utterly ridiculous when put together as a whole.
When Wan tries to shock, he succeeds. Saw is a movie that truly is the type of thing that nightmares are made of. And it’s not just the torturous set-ups that set the subconscious slumber thumbing a ride to Hell, it’s the entire package. Each and every set looks like it’s been stuck on the wrong side of Sesame Street‘s doppelganger in the middle of a garbage strike. No detail is left out, whether it’s a bloody body lying face down on the ground, feces-smeared walls or the screams of a child with a gun pointed to her head. And let’s not forget the evil marionette video messenger who just happens to be a clown to boot.
But what it comes down to is the simple fact that if you take the shock factor away, Saw doesn’t exist. You can look at it as high-brow schlock or a snuff mockumentary. There’s certainly little semblance of a story. In the acting department Danny Glover meanders about like a mummy who can almost be heard off camera saying, “Another Lethal Weapon might not be so bad after all.” Elwes acts as a reminder that The Princess Bride was an all too distant memory.
Saw‘s one of those movies you wish you could forget but it’s one that’s hard not to. Wan does a good job of creating genuinely disturbing images that are impossible to get out of your head. But is that enough reason for a film to come to be? I don’t think so, no matter how many desperate homoerotic conversations the characters may engage in or however much Wan seems indebted to David Fincher’s Se7en. Saw is an exercise in torture and sadism of the highest order.
Saw Gallery
Saw Trailer