Director:
James Wan
Starring:
Cary Elwes
Leigh Whannell
Danny Glover
Monica Parker
Release: 1 Oct. 04
IMDb
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Saw
BY: DAVID PERRY
The moral of the story in Saw is that one should love their
life while they have it. Yet no one will feel especially heartened to
the continuation of humanity after watching an overly violent, amateurish
thesis like this. Here’s a film that drives the point by imagining scenarios
in which people cause their own deaths by blood loss and incineration. All
this happens in the hands of a sadistic serial killer who more closely
resembles the filmmakers -- his pleasure in watching the pain of others is
augmented by the knowledge that he created the theatre for all this
suffering.
I’ve softened to Michael Haneke as he’s become less a rabid sadist and
more a cynical storyteller. His films -- it took him a dozen to do what
David Fincher did on his second, Se7en -- find a cross between the human
drama and the destructive forces of his own imagination. Saw is retrograde,
coming as a barely coherent exploration of violence for the sake of
violence. The twisty storytelling, usually at the expense of another
innocent, comes across as coverage for a failed script. The ideas of
Se7en-level storytelling are lost as the screenwriter (who also plays one of
the film’s main two victims) tries to cover his tracks by positing
impossible contrivances. The direction isn’t much better as director James
Wan goes crazy with the editing and sound. The promise of the opening -- in
which we are presented with two men given a sprawling riddle to solve lest
they die-- is lost as the film pains to explain everything that preceded
this scenario. The Canadian film Cube traveled similar territory but with
greater effect: answers were vague and barely found, and the meaning of the
violence had a personal sense of survival, not the scribbling of a kid who
thinks God’s gift to humanity is death.
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