“Saw” (2004)

Out of all of the movies that I have watched or am going to watch, this is one where the antagonist actually wins! Saw is a series that was started in 2004 that showed a dying man slowly killing the ungrateful people in the world. The movie starts with an introduction of the characters when they are chained in a bathroom by their leg on opposite sides of a room. There is a dead man laying in the middle of the floor with a gun in his hand and a bullet on the ground close to him. Lawrence, who is a doctor with a wife and a daughter, seems to not have such a good relationship with his family because he is always working and leaving the girls in the house. The other character in the room is Adam. In the beginning, viewers don’t really get a glimpse of who Adam is or where he came from. Viewers learn a lot more about Lawrence because of the excessive amount of flashbacks that end up leading to how he got in his situation. Lawrence leaves his house after his daughter says that the boogeyman was in her room. He reassures her that there is no such thing, before he leaves. A man dressed in a cloak then jumps out of Diana’s (the daughter) closet and takes over the house. The antagonist then ties Lawrence’s wife and daughter up and keeps them for Lawrence’s surprise. After a few hours in the bathroom, Adam and Lawrence seem to not have that much trust in each other because Jigsaw put them in there to kill each other. After further discovering, Lawrence finds a box inside of a wall that had a phone inside of it. The phone was unable to make calls, but others can call the phone. Anyways, the phone starts ringing and the call was from Lawrence’s house. With Lawrence’s wife on the other end, she tells him to not trust Adam and Adam actually knows who he is. Lawrence then questions Adam about how he knows his wife. Adam explains that he was being paid to take pictures of him by a man with a cut across his neck. The pictures were being requested by a former detective that got kicked off of the force after his partner died at the hands of Jigsaw, because he thought that Lawrence was the suspect. Adam knew that Lawrence wasn’t being truthful to his wife as well. Instead of going to his job at the hospital, Lawrence would go to hotels at night and have sex with his secretary. This draws the two further away from each other. The only resources that they have are hacksaws from a bag that also had the pictures that Adam took of Lawrence. After sitting there, Adam notices a picture right in front of him that has a man in his house during the time of night where Lawrence was out. Lawrence examines the picture and says that it was a man named Zep, who was a man that worked at the hospital. The mystery was uncovered and viewers now knew who the psychopath was. Then it was finally time for Zep to kill Lawrence’s wife and daughter. He calls the phone and has his wife Ali say that time was up. Little did Zep know, she managed to untie herself and fake having them tied. She then starts fighting with Zep, leading to many bullets ringing out in the house. This alerted the former detective who was watching Lawrence from across the street. He then runs over and fights Zep, leading to his death. This gives Ali and Diana time to run to a neighbors house and escape. Zep has no other choice but to go and kill Lawrence and Adam. He makes it there, but Lawrence had pretty much gone crazy and amputated his own leg, crawled to the gun, and shot Adam. Zep walks in the door of the bathroom and sees all of the chaos. He goes to finish off Lawrence but gets his leg grabbed by Adam. Adam then tackles him to the ground and smashes his head in with a sink. Lawrence then says he is going to get help and crawls out of the room. Now everyone is thinking, “amazing great happily ever after.” But there’s more. The man from before who was in the middle of the bathroom stands up and peels off a fake face to reveal the killer the entire time. The movie then shows the ultimate flashback on how this mess started. It shows how Zep was framed and forced to kill a daughter and wife or he will die from poison, and all of the other steps in order to completely do this the right way. The movie ends with Jigsaw leaving the dark bathroom with the sounds of Adam screaming.

To be completely honest, I wouldn’t necessarily call Saw “scary.” This movie did have scary parts to it, but these Saw movies deserve their own genre. The amounts of gore and crazy kills are unimaginable compared to other movies that I have watched. The movie overall sends a different message than the other one’s too, and that’s what I believe makes this movie more special. Instead of some random murderer killing helpless teens or random people, this guy is killing the ungrateful, selfish people in the world that have everything that a person could want, but doesn’t really care. I also enjoyed how the movie was very climactic at the end as opposed to the middle of the movie. It showed that a killer was still on the loose and builds up nicely to the sequel. After watching this movie, I would definitely want to see Saw 2 simply for closure on what happens after this movie. It makes the viewer ask questions, like “is Jigsaw going to die?” “What kind of crazy killing methods are going to be in the next movie?” And the fact that it leaves the audience questioning is the whole beauty of it. If the two men were able to escape and close the whole series right there, it wouldn’t have had that much of an impact on me than this ending. All in all, Saw was a good movie that featured some of the best kills that I have seen in this project and was a movie that made the viewer think that it was based on the kills, but then slipped in an amazing plot that no one was expecting.