**/****
starring Leigh Whannell, Cary Elwes, Danny Glover, Monica Potter
screenplay by Leigh Whannell
directed by James Wan
by Bill Chambers Saw is ready and rarin' to be analyzed, opening as it does with the scholar-baiting tableau of a man (Leigh Whannell, also the film's screenwriter) waking in a bathtub, baptized or reborn. (It just so happens that his name is Adam.) And I swear to God the bad guy lives on "Stygian Street." Everything about Saw points to Whannell putting the cart before the horse: symbolism before context; set-pieces before bridges; revelations before mysteries… The movie's logic is at once unassailable and curiously inorganic–twice characters choose not to shoot a gun at an opportune moment in order to facilitate a final turn of the screw, but since that's all they're doing, Whannell should never have armed them in the first place. This and the fact that the villain's motive is rendered arbitrary by us learning things at the pace of the heroes–Adam and Lawrence (Cary Elwes), a shutterbug and a doctor, respectively, who've been locked together in a fluorescent-lit dungeon with a dead body between them–is the sort of thing we'd not even stop to consider during a Dario Argento giallo, which finally places more blame on the fittingly-named James Wan's direction than on Whannell's script. Though the film does work marginally well as a satire of modern serial-killer thrillers and their increasingly Byzantine games of cat-and-mouse (not to mention the same in reality-TV), I have a hunch that's the zeitgeist's doing. Programme: Midnight Madness
