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Dancing_P [ 4.5 ]
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Saw, I'm afraid to say, is simply a happy product of happenstance. There are at least a dozen movies that are equally clever and sadistic made each year in the underground horror industry by small production houses that often don't even get their stuff into most video stores. That Saw got a nation-wide release is essentially the luck of the draw. A doctor (Cary Elwes) wakes up chained to a pipe in a grungy abandoned washroom with a stranger (Leigh Wannell) chained to another pipe on the other side of the room. A dead body lies in the middle, a tape recorder in his hand. Through audiotapes, each of the men are given instructions. One must kill the other to be released. If not, the doctor's family is killed. It begins as the world's sickest chamber piece but the filmmakers unwisely decide to lay on copious backstory (including Danny Glover as a cop who has fuck-all to do with anything), rendering the sick atmosphere of the set-up almost entirely moot. The cahracters find incredibly bone-headed clues around while wallowing in their own filth; meanwhile, cops bumble around and watch as the serial killer perpetrates the screenwriter's sickest concotions. What might have worked as a 30-minute short is expanded so much, all the good stuff is watered-down beyond interest. What's more, it's almost entirely illogical and nonsensical; things are revealed only when they're good for the plot and plotholes are rampant. The acting is bad all around, probably due to the fact that there were no rehearsals to speak of; rehearsal footage is actually part of the final cut of the film. The director favors washed-out colors, choppy editing and a lot of fast movement to cover up the fact that there's not nearly enough here to sustain a full-length movie. The sadistic set-ups are fun, yeah, but I don't see why we need so much filler around it.
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chapter11 [ 3.0 ]
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What "Saw" lacks in intellect and originality it attempts to make up for in sheer grisliness, which, to be perfectly clear, doesn't exactly do it for me. As the situations twist and turn and wind their way to a thrilling conclusion totally devoid of any holes in plot or logic (am i overarching for my sarcasm? yeah, i think i might be), one can't help but get lost in the shuffle, and realize that the only thing you're going to take out of this is, "yeah, so if you've never seen a grown man cut off a limb with a rusty hacksaw, this was totally the movie for you." The "rusty hacksaw" line can, of course, be replaced with "crawl screaming through ropes of razor wire" or "bludgeon another man to death with the porcelain thing that covers the tank on the shitter," depending on your mood. The twist? Lame, but to be expected; when a twist comes along that's not lame, i won't expect it even more than i wouldn't have if I hadn't been sufficiently jaded by thrillers like "Saw," and it'll be a beautiful thing, but this one blows. Oh, and the whole psychopath-as-harbinger-of-his-own-twisted-morality angle? Sooooo over. "Seven" rocked my world, yeah, but seeing junior pop-psych followers cream their jeans to the cavernous minds of self-righteous bastards like the bad guys in "Life of David Gale" or "Boondock Saints" makes me throw up at the prospect of another psychopath turning out to be just another angel of harsh, swift justice. Pricks like that don't deserve movies about the duality of their condition, they deserve to have their strawberry sacks stomped. Period.
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kcremer [ 5.5 ]
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"Saw" is to "Seven" what Frank Stallone is to Sly. (I apologize to all you Frank Stallone fans out there.)
Those of you who don't mind unoriginal, contrived plots with bad acting and are just looking for a few scares and decent visuals will enjoy this movie. However, if you are looking for something along the lines of "Seven", which had a very original story, good direction, excellent acting, and a truly crazy surprise ending, you will be disappointed. I correctly guessed on the ending within the first twenty minutes of this. (And I'm not the brightest crayon in the box) :)
A little footnote here: Cary Elwes is extremely miscast in this. He has some terrible lines, one involving cutesy talk with his young daughter that made me cringe. Also, there is so much attempt at humor in this that I wondered if I was actually watching a bad comedy at times.
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Mohawk [ 8.0 ]
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Right from the off the movie - shoots off at break neck speed. The questions the two main characters are exactly the ones you want to ask and find out (where are we? why are we here? who are you?).
The plot becomes more and more intriguing as it develops.
This is by no means the perfert thriller/horror, the acting isn't of the highest calibre - however i would certainly recommend this to fans of movies like Seven.
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DokBrowne [ 3.0 ]
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This movie joins the ranks of "The Grudge", "Cabin Fever", "House of 1000 Corpses", and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" remake as yet another overhyped and unbelievably somewhat-praised garbage can full of intolerably pretentious horror genre cliches. I'm almost starting to wonder if I've grown too cynical, since even my best friend and longtime moviegoing companion said "Saw" was cool, and he'd been hating on the trailers for months. I suppose it is a little preferable to the aforementioned titles, if only because it doesn't contain quite the same volume of stupidity as them, and it never actually becomes offensively bad, but it's still pretty weak. The premise: interesting. And some of the devices (of the villain and of the plot) border on clever (border). Beyond that, it's downhill.
Side note: the trailers we saw were for "The Devil's Rejects" ("House of 1000 Corpses" 2), "Hide and Seek" (Robert DeNiro playing host to a psychotic kid again), and "Boogeyman" in which "7th Heaven"'s Barry Watson fights a haunted house (with the "aide", needless to say, of a creepy kid). These 3 utterly predictable and painful-looking previews did not help set the bar for what I was about to watch
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| Weighted Rating | : 4.8 |
| No. Ratings | : 14 | |
| No. Reviews | : 7 | |
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