Saw

Sick and Disturbing, yet Oddly Satisfying

Plot:

A young man named Adam (Leigh Whannell) wakes to find himself chained to a rusty pipe inside a decrepit subterranean chamber. Chained to the opposite side of the room is another bewildered captive, Dr. Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes). Between them is a dead man lying in a pool of blood, holding a .38 in his hand. Neither man knows why he has been abducted, but instructions left on a microcassette order Dr. Gordon to kill Adam within eight hours. If he fails to do so, then both men will die; Dr. Gordon’s wife, Alison, and his daughter will also be killed.

Recalling a recent murder investigation by a police detective named Tapp (Danny Glover), Dr. Gordon realizes he and Adam are the next victims of a psychopathic genius known only as “Jigsaw.” With only a few hours left to spare, they must unravel the elaborate puzzle of their fate in the midst of mounting terror. The killer has provided them with only a few clues and two handsaws–too weak to break their steel shackles, but strong enough to cut through flesh and bone. Can they solve the riddles?

Release Date: January 19, 2004
Distributor: Lionsgate
Directed By: James Wan (this is his movie’s debut)
Starring: Cary Elwes, Danny Glover, Monica Potter, Michael Emerson, Ken Leung, Tobin Bell, Leigh Whannell
Budget: $1,200,000
Gross Revenue: $55,153,403 (USA) $103,000,000 (worldwide)

Review:

For the past few years, Hollywood’s horror genre is dominated only by three themes: hack and slash, evil spirit, and the living dead (zombie). If you read the plot, you’d probably think that Saw is also just an ordinary hack and slash type, with a lot of blood and “cool” way to kill and die. That’s obviously not the case for Saw.

The main protagonist of Saw is actually the villain Jigsaw. Although you only gonna see him in very few scenes, this characters makes quite an impact for audiences. He is a criminal mastermind who likes to abduct people, then put the victims in a situation where they have to solve puzzles and hard riddles to save their life. He doesn’t do that for no reason, but because of his anger of seeing many people waste their precious life, life that Jigsaw soon will lose due to his illness.

Saw focus on two of Jigsaw victims, Adam and Dr. Gordon. They both are locked in a bathroom inside an abandoned building, with one of their legs is chained to a pipe. As time progress, they relieve their memories about how they can be locked up there, and what’s the possible reason why someone wants to kidnap them. They are also left with some clues to solve puzzles, which include two handsaws, to see how far they’re willing to go to save their life.

Although the idea is violent, like how someone have to rip up the stomach of a drugged person just to relieve a key, or how Adam and Dr. Gordon should cut their own leg if they want to survive, Saw isn’t displayed with many gore. This is the exact strong point of Saw, which shows how a film doesn’t need to show excessive screams and bloodshed to make audience chills. Besides that, this movie also has a twisted story with unpredictable ending.

However, Saw also doesn’t offer many other things that gonna makes it valuable to be watched more than once. Some other drawbacks from Saw are probably just from some technical details, such as dull sound effects, shaky picture, and weak editing. Those are the mistakes that very acceptable for a debuting director which only use a very small budget.

My Rating: B-

IMDb user rating: 7.7/10

Rotten Tomatoes meter: 48%

Metacritic: 46/100

Yahoo! critics: B-

Yahoo! users: B

Your Ratings: (1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)
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Note that ratings and gross revenue are based from when this review was written, so the values might already changed by now.