I do not normally like films about sadistic killers (“Se7en”, “The Cell”, “Hannibal”, “The Bone Collector” etc…) so I went into “Saw” with relatively low expectations. Parts of the movie do work rather effectively but lots of it feels unnecessary.

Adam Faulkner-Stanheight (Leigh Whannell) and Doctor Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes “The Princess Bride”, “Robin Hood: Men In Tights”) wake up chained to a pipe at opposite ends of a bathroom. They soon realise they have been selected for punishment by the notorious ‘Jigsaw’ serial killer. They will need to work together and also against one another if they want to survive.

Leigh Whannell is not a professional actor and you can tell. The man helped write this thing and was used as Adam due to the constraints of the low budget. However, the Adam characters is okay. Cary Elwes is fine as Lawrence despite a few instances where his accent seems to change for no real reason. The scenes with these two are interesting and intense as they struggle to make sense of their situation. There are other scenes involving other characters such as Detective Tapp (Danny Glover “Lethal Weapon”) but these characters and their situations just seem to distract from Adam and Lawrence’s struggle.

Most people think of “Saw” as a complete gore fest but there are surprisingly few graphic moments in this one. Apparently, the sequels put much more emphasis on the gore. The violence that is in here is still disgusting. The bathroom scenes work well and the final twist is actually pretty good but the flashback scenes, the scenes with Tapp and the lengthy sequence involving a girl with a reverse beartrap just ruined it for me. They only seem to exist to make the movie longer and they add little to nothing to the experience. It’s nowhere near as bad as it could have been but it makes some choices that prevented me from being legitimately entertained.