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Review

TLA Catalog:
Ever since Se7en, filmmakers have been striving to find the same level of intensity and depth in thrillers for the big and small screens. Saw falls short, but it gives audiences unrepulsed by gore a good ride for the money. Young director James Wan emulates Se7en to the point that things become overly complicated, damaging credibility. But Wan is also clearly influenced by the Italian giallo horror films of Dario Argento in which dreamlike energy and visual creativity are the focus, not earthbound reality — much like a symphony operates at a separate level than opo melodies. Saw documents the activities of a pulp supervillain whose schemes are so ingenious and involved that they defy logic. But then, when you look at the intricate workings of a Swiss watch, it seems that creating it involved way too much work for something as simple as just telling the time. The complex horrors are beyond the emotive powers of some of the cast members, a detriment in a film that keeps the audience focused on its maze of plot.

Danger After Dark:
I’m sorry, but you have got to be kidding me. I’m aware that Saw has its fans (though I would be curious to know how many of the film’s online fan supporters are, either directly or indirectly, on the take of the film’s distributor Lion’s Gate), and it has certainly enjoyed exposure in major film festivals from Sundance to Toronto — but there’s no getting around the simple fact that this is easily one of the worst horror films to be released in America in years, and it’s pretty embarrassing that this contrived, amateurish mess wound up being as widely appreciated as it did. There’s genius connected to the film, alright – the genius of Lion’s Gate’s marketing division, who somehow managed to hoodwink mainstream American filmgoers into shelling out a total of 55 million dollars to see a desperate, hackneyed serial killer thriller that ultimately resembles a pedestrian B-movie one stumbles across on basic cable at three in the morning.

The plot is the same generic and implausible tricky tripe typically concocted by young and largely unintelligent film school twits eager to impress: two confused strangers awaken in a grimy industrial space, chained to walls on opposite sides of the room, with the corpse of another man lying between them. Soon they are given clues by their sadistic captor as to how they may escape, and the two men begin to piece together the reasons for their imprisonment, and the possible identity of the murderer who is tormenting them in such relentlessly cinematic bullshit ways. Ugh.

The fundamental problem with Saw actually isn’t its laughable screenplay or even its often alarming filmmaking ineptitude — I defy you to find another wide-release film from 2004 that features such astonishingly poor performances from every single actor in the cast; it would be an equally futile endeavor to come up with another major feature film whose barren production design values so closely resemble those of San Fernando Valley’s prolific hardcore porn industry — but, rather, its absolute insincerity and complete absence of any relation to the real world, or at least a world that seems “real” to its creators. The plot isn’t necessarily any more outlandish than the likes of Se7en or any number of Dario Argento thrillers, but those superior genre films are guided by the visionary sensibilities of their directors, whether it's the grimy hyper-realism of Fincher’s dour worldview or the surreal stylization of Argento’s colorful gialli.

Director James Wan and his writer Leigh Wannell don’t seem to have any more investment in the material than we do, though, and as a result, the film just feels like the callous, exploitive work of two smug pricks anxious to foist a gimmicky calling card debut on the filmgoing public. Avoid at all costs, though it’s fitfully amusing to see the film spiral so deeply and appallingly into the realm of the incompetent and absurd by the third act.

 -- Travis Crawford