I didn’t have any intentions of watching a Saw movie. They look to me, for the most part, to exist only for really elaborate booby traps and gruesome death scenes. However, I have, through cultural osmosis, learned more or less how the first movie went, and I was curious enough to see how the first movie went. Director James Wan is a real talent when it comes to horror, so why not give one movie a shot? Worst case scenario is it isn’t very good.
Though I still have no plans on watching many of the sequels right now…
The movie opens (and is mostly set in) a large, industrial, grimy bathroom. Adam (Leigh Whannell, who co-wrote the script with Wan) and Lawrence (Cary Elwes) wake up there almost at the same time. They are both chained to a pipe on opposite sides of the room. There’s what looks like a man dead from suicide in the middle of the room. They have access to a handful of items, most notably a hacksaw for both of them, though the saws are not strong enough to cut through the chains. If they don’t do as they’re told, they can be given electric shocks through the chains. Essentially, the two men have to use the items at hand to solve some riddles within a certain amount of time or they both die. The rules they’ve been given seem to suggest only one will be allowed to leave alive. It would seem they have been captured by the mysterious Jigsaw killer.
Also, in a series of flashbacks, we see two cops (Danny Glover and Ken Leung) looking to catch Jigsaw, a killer whose death traps are there to force people to decide just how much they want to live. To date, only one victim has gotten away, a former heroin addict who did some fairly gruesome things to avoid an even more gruesome fate. Who is Jigsaw and how far will Adam, Lawrence, or the cops go to live?
Now, as I said above, I more or less knew how this movie goes. Despite the Saw series’s reputation for gruesome death traps, there really aren’t too many on display here. The worst is the “reverse bear trap,” and the victim there gets away. What Jigsaw does in this movie is psychologically push his victims to do horrible things to themselves or others in order to live. His victims are also people, it seems, who have offended his personal sensibilities, so his survivors supposedly learn to appreciate life more. It’s a bit of a twisted lesson, and the movie does a good job of suggesting Jigsaw himself thinks what he is doing to people is perfectly fair. Follow his rules to the letter, and you can survive and appreciate your life more. Granted, you may have to commit an act of violence or murder against someone else, but how badly do you want to live?
As I’ve seen with Wan’s other work, this is a tightly directed movie, and even knowing the film’s twists didn’t put me off of it in the slightest. There’s a low budget quality to the movie (no doubt the result of an actual low budget), and while the cast included a number of familiar faces, outside of Glover and Elwes, I recognized them from TV. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it is clear Wan and Whannell used what they had to maximum effect. Again, despite the series’s reputation, this movie is more about psychological horror more than it is about gore and violence. Indeed, most of the worst of the violence occurs off-camera, and when it needs to be shown, it comes out at the most effective time. I still don’t plan to see too many more of these, but this was still a tight thriller/horror movie, and it’s easy to see why it spawned so many other movies after it.
Grade: B+
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