Why don't serial killers just kill people anymore? Ever since Silence of the Lambs and Seven, movie serial killers have gotten more and more elaborate with each new film, going to greater and greater lengths to convince audiences of their menace. Is murder no longer scary enough? Now we've got a movie, Saw, in which the killer doesn't even actually kill anybody. He traps his victims in elaborate scenarios in which they are forced, somehow, to cause their own deaths. Director James Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell have obviously seen Seven a good seven times too many, and you can imagine them sitting around gleefully devising more and more intricate and ridiculous situations to which to subject their characters.
If only they'd spent as much time on dialogue, characterization and casting. The film starts with an intriguing premise: Two men, a doctor (Cary Elwes) and a photographer (writer Whannell), wake up in a dingy bathroom, each chained to pipes on opposite sides of the room. In the middle of the room is a dead body, surrounded by a pool of blood and clutching a tape recorder in one hand and a pistol in the other. Each man is given a tape to play, and clues are doled out as to the location of such items as a cigarette, a cell phone, a photograph and a pair of hacksaws that don't do much to cut through the chains but look suspiciously like they'd be effective on human flesh and bone.
It's the kind of setup that would make for a great one-act play, or maybe a terse, minimalist feature film, but Wan and Whannell can't leave well enough alone. Nearly half of the movie is comprised of flashbacks that are supposed to illuminate the backgrounds of the two men and their tormentor, but really just serve to introduce characters who can serve as red herrings so the audience will spend time wondering who the killer is. Danny Glover flounders in a subplot about the dedicated (but, judging by his actions, really, really stupid) cop who is always thisclose to catching the killer.
Elwes and Whannell are absolutely awful, stiff and histrionic at the same time, and only some of that can be blamed on Whannell's wooden dialogue and Wan's emphasis on flashy, Fincher-esque images over nuances of character. Those gruesome death scenarios are indeed gruesome, and will have some gore addicts smiling in sadistic glee, but the rest is all ludicrous plotting and nonsensical twists.