Saw
by James Wan
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Cary Elwes, Danny Glover, Dina Meyer, Ken Leung, Leigh WhannellDirector: James Wan
Brand: ELWES,CARY
Writer: Leigh Whannell
Writer: James Wan
Producer: Daniel J. Heffner
Producer: Gregg Hoffman
Producer: Jason Constantine
Producer: Lark Bernini
Producer: Mark Burg
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 103 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-02-15
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Lions Gate
Movie Reviews of Saw
Movie Review: Riddles in the Dark
Summary: 5 Stars
When you awake it is so dark you can taste it.
You swim up through the darkness, struggling fitfully out of sleep, strangling, lungs clotted with the choking darkness, close around you and pressing down on your chest. You struggle out of one nightmare to awake in another: you're not in your own bed. The darkness is total: the stink of death rancid in your nostrils. You're on a cold, wet tile floor, but beyond that you can't see anything, can't find your way in the ink-black dark that covers you. You panic: your breath is fast and ragged, you whimper and cry out.
Now: most nightmares are the worst when the lights are out; when the lights come on, you're snug, cuddled beneath the blanket of Normalcy and the Everyday. In "Saw", the nightmare begins when the lights come on.
By now, everyone knows the legendary set-up of the deliciously sick piece of celluloid that is "Saw": Adam (screenwriter Leigh Whannell) and Dr. Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes, playing a guy named "Lawrence" if ever there was one) awake chained to pipes across from each other in a filthy industrial utility room. In the middle of this abbatoir lies the corpse of a man, face down in his own blood, a .38 revolver clamped in his dead hand. Their true whereabouts? Unknown. How they came there? Unknown. The someone---or something---that delivered them to such a state?
Unknown.
"Saw" might pass itself off as a horror movie, but the fact is that this engine of death and destruction is a flick with more on its mind than splatter. This is a film about Crime and Punishment.
In our enlightened age, we kill our killers with lethal injection. Think of that: those who kill children and bury them alive, hack the limbs off antique pensioners, those who scar and murder and rape and mutilate and defile---all of them are sent out of this vale of tears in a state of peaceful, drug-addled slumber. Some of you---myself included---would say this is a travesty: even the Death Penalty in our enfeebled land is hardly a true punishment tailored to the brutalities perpetrated by the worst of the worst.
Well, then, rejoice in "Saw", for the killer---the man, or Creature, or being, or darksome thing that lurks behind the name and mask of the Jigsaw Killer---feels as we do: he is a believer in Justice. He is a believe in the ultimate Talmudic rite: let the Punishment fit the Crime.
Dr. Gordon and Adam find their respective instructions, left on a tape muffled and distorted but wickedly clear: they have eight hours. Eight hours to kill the other man, to cut him down like a dog, to find the key, to escape the deathhouse, this charnel sewer. Eight hours: Fail, and for Adam, it is Death. For Dr. Gordon, it is death---and the death of Family as well (Mackenzie Vega and Monica Potter, both carrying their weight admirably).
"Saw" is a brilliant little piece of terror, perfectly economical, remarkably efficient at terrorizing its audience. It is more so for being entirely unpredictable: I found "Saw" to be the cinematic equivalent of drinking Scotch on the porch, outside, on a summer night: lifting the tumbler to your lips, only to find your mouth millimeters away from a fat, bloated, dying Black Widow spider, contorted with her death throes, larger than a piece of ice, floating, seething, dying in your drink.
I have never seen a film---outside "The Blair Witch Project"---so dependent on light and dark to evoke a mood. I have never seen a film so entirely capable and competent at conjuring up a mood of isolation, of wicked machination, of brutal death, solely by its use of light and dark. "Saw" immerses you in a charnel house sunk deep within the ground, well stocked with clues---indeed, whatever you think of this monster called the Jigsaw Killer, you must at least acknowledge his willingness to provide his victims with the means to their salvation.
Watch "Saw" in the dark, all the lights off, preferably with a storm howling and pounding outside the window. For "Saw" is only slightly a serial killer movie: it tips its hat to "Se7en" and "Silence of the Lambs", but its dark, wicked, brutal art is born from far more truly from the monster movie. "Saw" is about a monster: a creature that crawls, writhes, plots, engineers, from the shadows.
Director James Wan has pulled off what, by my lights, is the perfect horror movie: compactly edited, brutally effective, happy to spill blood in the service of its message, consumingly efficient and economic. If there is a scarier device in cinema than a puppet rolled out on a tricycle to gibber in the dark, I have yet to see it. Wan and Director of Photography David Armstrong use dark and light to evoke claustrophobia, fear's aphrodisiac, and spike the mixture with psychedelic images of horror and death.
The acting throughout is solid and compelling. Much has been said about Elwes's overracting---but as you watch "Saw", you realize this is a film about surfaces, and the darkness, and lies, and deception that lies beneath. Yes, Dr. Gordon is over the top---and he has a reason to be. Elwes and Whannel carry their roles like champs, right down to the point where those rusty hacksaws become one-way tickets to the bright land of Normalcy. Danny Glover (Detective Tapp)pounds out the most engaging, riveting performance of his career, as a defrocked detective who can't let go.
"Saw" is a brutal, seedy, seething charnel-house of death and truth. Yes, yes---"Live or Die, make your Choice"---but if Jim Morrison was right about no one here getting out alive, how much of a choice do we have?
JSG
Summary of Saw
Two strangers chained to pipes in an abandoned bathroom and separated solely by a corpse are tortured by a sadistic serial killer.Genre: Horror
Rating: R
Release Date: 18-JUL-2006
Media Type: DVD
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