Saw

So late last night, not in the mood for writing (I did do some yesterday) or any more reading (ditto) I flipped on TV, cycled through some channels, and found "Saw", which was just about to start, and which I hadn't seen.

So what the hell. I watched it.

Saw has a great hook, in that it starts out with two guys, chained by their ankles to pipes on opposite ends of what looks like an oddly-huge bathroom, with a dead guy lying in a pool of blood in the center. They find small cassette tapes in their pockets, which fit in the cassette player near the dead guy, which they are able to retrieve.

When they play the tapes, they learn that same guy is messing with them. He has stashed things around the room to help them escape. But he also makes clear that if one guy doesn't kill the other by a certain time, the guy's wife and daughter will be killed.

At this point I was hooked, because there's something dark and primal about this, while the great thing about this story is that we feel like we are going through it with them; we find ourselves thinking about where helpful stuff can be, and how these guys can possibly get out of it.

It has the same appeal as many video games; you are put into a situation, and you have to figure out a way out of it.

*** Spoilers ***

Unfortunately, the writers really can't sustain the conceit. There's a great 90-minute movie in the basic concept here, a movie that just stays in the room with these two guys, as they puzzle stuff out, alternatively work with each other and turn on each other, and figure out the depths to which their unseen tormentor is messing with them.

Unfortunately this movie would have taken great talent to write, to sustain a piece with one location and two actors, and Saw doesn't really try. Instead it keeps leaving the room, for flashbacks and concurrent stories, that have a lot of shock value but which also keep costing the basic storyline a lot of its tension.

After a while all of these cutaway scenesl start feeling like a cheat, because none of the characters in the room are privy to most of this; in fact, no character in the movie is privy to most of this, not even the bad guy. It's a huge, twisty show that is really just put on for the audience, who are the only people who can really appreciate it.

But in terms of the bad guy's motivations, it just seems too contrived and over-complex, especially since at the heart of this the point is really supposed to be how basic this actually is. You have a chain around your ankle, a deadline, and a saw. How soon before you use the saw on your ankle?

So while it helps kill time to have another character who turns out to have kidnapped the wife and daughter because he is being manipulated into it, and an obsessed cop trying to figure it out, it all just feels like an unnecessary risk by the supposedly-psycholtically-brilliant villain.

Plus, the whole idea of the face-down apparently-dead guy on the floor actually being the bad guy has been used a lot, and here it really doesn't serve any purpose at all -- there's absolutely no reason he needs to spend 7 hours on the floor, playing dead, when he could be comfortably sitting in the room next door, watching and listening over a camera or through a two-way mirror. Yeah, it's a nice shot when he rises out of the blood at the end, but it still needs to make a certain amount of sense.

(I'm also unclear exactly who this guy is, and how he ties in with the doctor; there's some way-too-rushed-for-2AM exposition about a brain tumor, or something. The doctor and the other guy also remain naggingly underdeveloped).

Still, there are things here that work, and it's nice to watch a horror movie that gets parts of your brain working, even if it falls a bit short at the end; it's easy to see how this rose above most recent, unimaginative horror entries, and why the sequel did so well.

But I still think it would have been more satisfying just staying in the room, for 90 minutes, with these two guys.