Saw
Director: James Wan
Writer: Leigh Whannell
Producers: Mark Burg, Gregg Hoffman, Oren Koules
Stars: Cary Elwes, Leigh Whannell, Danny Glover, Monica Potter

Something I both love and hate to do, after watching a movie about a serial killer who devises fiendish, sadistic killings and plays head games with his pursuers, is to ask myself: How exactly did the killer want things to unfold? And, given what is possible within the limits of the killer’s ability to plan, did the movie play fair?

Much of the action of Saw, an imaginatively grisly but ultimately sloppy and disappointing thriller, revolves around two men (Dr. Gordon, played by Cary Elwes, and Adam, played by writer Leigh Whannell) chained at opposite ends of a room. There are a few key props meant to help them understand what’s going on and possibly, possibly, escape their circumstances alive. They frequently have to toss the props (photographs, a small key, the titular cutting implement) back and forth across the room. If once, just once, a prop had say, landed out of reach in the middle of the room as the result of a bad toss, what would the killer have done? Would he reveal himself in order to retrieve the prop so his puppets could carry on his elaborate little game? Or would he let his whole plan go down the tubes because one of his victims can’t throw?

It doesn’t matter. Saw, heavily influenced by the superior Se7en, is like a sampler platter of the ghastly, a rough assemblage of variably intense and bloody vignettes that sometimes work in the moment, but become more and more frustrating as time rolls on and we realize that no explanation can make this movie’s contrivances hold water.

We open in the above-mentioned room, a grimy bathroom with a tub, a couple of toilets, and a corpse in the middle of the floor, gun clutched in hand next to a juicy-looking head wound. Dr. Gordon, emotionally constricted, trying to think clearly, explains that they’re most likely prisoners of the Jigsaw Killer, a psychopath who enjoys building elaborate imprisonment scenarios that invariably end with the victim causing their own mutilation. This time around, a tape-recorded message informs the Doctor that if he doesn’t murder total stranger Adam by 6 o’clock, his wife and daughter will be killed.

And just to add a pleasant twist, there are a pair of saws in the room; not strong enough to cut their chains, but plenty sturdy enough to cut off their feet. Clearly the Jigsaw Killer is a Mad Max fan.

Strangely, not one single time (and I thought back on this) do either of these men say anything about the choice Dr. Gordon has to make. If I were Adam, I would probably ask, at least once, if Dr. Gordon intended to really kill me or not, and maybe even (since I had a few hours) try and talk him out of it.

Even more strangely, they’re pretty lackadaisical in their observation of the ticking clock for which the killer has so kindly created such an ominous deadline. Instead, we get long scenes of low-wit stressed-out banter; and when they get tired of sniping and throwing props back and forth, they start reminiscing.

Then there’s a series of flashbacks which I imagine the filmmakers satisfy themselves by calling Rashomon-like, which would be fine, except that they are not. They’re just flashbacks delivered out of order. We watch examples of Jigsaw’s past work, a police detective (Danny Glover) whose investigation has become an unhealthy, unauthorized obsession, and moments from Dr. Gordon’s life before he became the latest victim. Ooverworked, arrogant, chilly towards his family and on the verge of an affair, he’s actually questioned as a suspect in the Jigsaw case.

It’s when we get to see the killer’s other handiwork that the movie shows off its greatest intensity. Director James Wan shot one of these mini-set-pieces as a demo in order to raise the financing for the picture. He shows admirable ingenuity with his dollars, the movie looks good for having so little to spend; and you can see why investors were impressed. In one vignette, a young woman (Shawnee Smith) wakes up with a nightmarish metal contraption locked around her head, and Jigsaw (who targets people he judges don’t significantly appreciate the gift of life) tells her that if she doesn’t unlock it before the timer dings, this “reverse bear trap” will tear off her jaw. Inconveniently, the only key is inside the stomach of someone lying in the corner.

Wan and Whannell deliver several variations on such gruesome survival dilemmas, and they are each creative in their way, although given the resources involved one must resign oneself to the fact that this stuff only takes place in the land of Movie Serial Killers. And Jigsaw’s got one mother of an Amex bill coming in the mail.

Clearly unrestrained by Wan, none of the actors enjoy their finest hours here – excepting maybe Smith, who makes the most of her time as the bear-trap’s would-be victim. Elwes in particular is disappointingly hammy and spends the movie’s final third in almost total exhausting hysterics. And Whanell’s incessant, snarky whininess reminds us that, while it is smart for young actors to write producible scripts with significant roles for themselves, they had better be talented enough to carry off those roles.

But really, you don’t come here for the acting. You come here for ominous soundtrack groans, and squirts of blood, and wicked surprises that leave people suddenly very, very dead. Saw provides a fair share of that, executed with energy and competence on a moment by moment basis. But if you start asking how, for example, the Killer knew that, were he ever chased by cops down a certain corridor, he’d be chased in that direction; or why a cop would actually invite his prime suspect in a murder case to watch a statement being made by the killer’s one survivor, the whole thing will end up making you feel worse in your stomach than that poor sap with the key.

“I’m just a soul whose intentions are good
Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood”
     -The Animals

Machinery is what The Jigsaw Killer (Tobin Bell) specialized in during his life, and since the Saw franchise that chronicles his exploits has now succeeded in making three sequels after the death of its main character, it is fitting that those sequels feature machines he built or conceived of in life, that are still grinding thoughtlessly on without him. And Saw VI does feature a saw – by my recollection, every film in the series thus far has contained at least one, and you have to think they make sure of things like that.

I have seen all the Saw movies, originally created by director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannell, and have not thought a single one good. But Saw VI, which shows the franchise out of ideas and beyond the threshold of self-parody, has a way of reflecting back on what few morsels of promise existed in the early movies. In hindsight they find themselves improved, now that I have seen how it is possible for them to be worse.

This second Saw trilogy has focused on police Lt. Hoffman (Costas Mandylor), who became one of Jigsaw’s acolyte/assistants, and has taken it upon himself to carry on Jigsaw’s work, with the help of a few audio and video recordings the boss conveniently left behind. Between Hoffman and bear-trap-escaping junkie Amanda (Shawnee Smith, her character deceased but also returning for flashbacks), Jigsaw is more of a delegating manager than a hands-on psychopath. He has so much help that when we now see them in flashback setting up the traps of previous films, it’s like a backstage documentary on show night, everyone wishing each other luck as the curtain is about to go up.

Hoffman is in multi-tasking mode – on the one hand, he is endeavoring to finish covering his tracks by framing an FBI agent he squished in part V for the latest round of Jigsaw-ing. There’s a rather good scene of suspense, where he knows his fellow cops are about to figure out something from an audio recording (which repeats under the scene like a drum to the gallows), and is deciding just what he’s going to have to do about it. Since we know there are no pleasant options, his sweat rather neatly becomes our dread, and there aren’t many times this franchise has pulled off a moment like that.

But at the same time he is administering a complex new game that represents some of the late Jigsaw’s final wishes. It involves a health insurer (Peter Outerbridge) who has become rich by canceling the policies of the sick, and who is forced in the de rigueur dank, booby-trapped labyrinth to, quite viscerally, chose who will live and who will die. The Saw franchise has plenty of bad habits, and one of them is a history of creating characters that, even in a life-threatening moment, are mean, foul-mouthed, and dumb. This episode feature two characters who are plunked in a cage next to a switch parked between two settings – “Live” or “Die” – and need an hour to bicker about what they should do with it. It is less than frightening when a movie like this gives you the easy out of making all its victims venal and nasty, you get to lean back in your chair and never think it could happen to you, since you are such an upstanding citizen.

This Outerbridge is an interesting actor – he looks more than a little like Henry Fonda with his penetrating eyes. Since half the dialogue is semi-intelligent screaming and weeping, and his only calm scenes are in his office pre-kidnapping, repeatedly showing off his heelishness for the viewers with poor retention, this isn’t exactly a showcase for his talents. But there’s something sympathetic about him that you can sense the filmmakers thought could be useful.

It’s Tobin Bell’s performance as John Kramer, aka Jigsaw, that has made him a horror icon that now stands on the shelf with Freddy, Jason, and the other brand-name terrors of the 70’s and 80’s. And he should be commended, his sepulchral visage and quiet self-assurance are magnetic; he convinces you there are ghastly ideas clicking away beneath those dull eyes.

But his characteristically-messy demise in Saw III threatened to rob the franchise of one of its two trademarks; the other being the springs-and-gears contraptions in which he and his accomplices imprison people to creatively destroy their bodies and minds. This time around we get a merry-go-round with one place you don’t want to be in when it stops spinning; and a competitive trap that awards survival to the participant willing to cut off the most of their flesh. The female in the trap (Tandera Howard, who won the role in a reality show that tested her screaming ability) realizes how painful and slow it is to carve off chunks with the smaller knife, and trades up to better equipment. She asks the right question – what the hell was this nightmare supposed to teach her about her job in real-estate loans?

I used to add the caveat that Jigsaw believed (no matter how inevitably he failed) that, with these traps, he was testing peoples’ survival instinct by making them choose between torment and death. But whatever patina of moral purpose the previous episodes were able to harvest from better movies has long worn off, and we now have just the ruthless grinding gears of plot mechanisms. It is only about the mutilation and the kill, and probably always has been. Writers Patrick Melton & Marcus Dunstan, who have kept the scripts churning out annually since IV with increasingly double-jointed application of flashbacks and soap opera contrivances, in a way are demonstrating skills vital to the ongoing life of the franchise. What they have not done is prove this franchise should live.