There is nothing virtuous, lovely or of good report in this film. In fact, when this phrase popped into my head after the film, I started laughing out loud. It’s just funny, thinking about that phrase in the context of this film.

Saw is a dark, gritty film about torture. So, there’s some crazy guy out there who perversely tries to get people to “appreciate” their lives by making them do dangerous things to preserve their lives. One man fails to get through a razor bush, a woman succeeds at cutting up a living man to get a key inside of him that will unlock a device that is about to pull her head off. It’s all unsettling just thinking about it.

The primary conflict involves two men, Adam (Leigh Whannell) and Lawrence (Cary Elwes), who are chained to the floor in an abandoned bathroom. They are provided only with saws that don’t cut chains but will cut flesh and bones. Lawrence must cut his foot off and then kill Adam or his wife and child will die. Oddly enough, things don’t go as bad as we might expect, they go worse. All I can say is that the guys who wrote the movie, who happen to be Whannell and director James Wan, have got to be seriously messed up in the head.

Not that the film doesn’t keep your attention. I was largely captivated. But that, I believe, had more to do with holding the tension of the primary conflict throughout the film than it did with good storytelling. The single conflict lasts the whole of the film, with the addition of some flashbacks and the side story Detective David Tapp (Danny Glover), who’s tracking down the guilty party.

IMDB informs me that the film was originally NC-17 for its gore and then edited down to its R status for release in theaters. You know, I don’t even want to know what was edited out there. I seriously don’t even want to know.

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