Rewind Files: Taking a Hack at Movies Like Saw

There’s a distinction to be made when a critic calls a movie “important” and when a critic calls a movie “influential.” An important movie can be influential, and in fact it’s probably the hope of both the filmmakers and the critics that this cause-and-effect takes place, but an influential movie isn’t always important. In other words, a movie might have an influence that people see as detrimental or negative or counter-productive. Saw was that kind of movie.

You can take Saw down to some surprising depths. There’s a lot to talk about in regards to how it paved the way for the “torture-porn” horror genre, and there’s just as much to talk about in regards to it being the breakout flick for director James Wan, who would go on to helm The Conjuring, The Conjuring 2, Insidious, Insidious: Chapter 2, Furious 7, and coming next year, Aquaman. In other words, Saw gave us one of the most prevalent movie subgenres of the 2000s, and it unleashed one of the 2010s’ most proficient (and competent, for what it’s worth) filmmakers. Saw had influence, even if it wasn’t important for people to see.

If you take one step closer to Saw, the question becomes less about what the movie accomplished in its wake and more about the movie itself: Mainly, did this movie deserve to be hated so much when it came out? Critics panned Saw. Scott Tobias of the AV Club called it “dumber than a box of rocks” and David Germain of the Associated Press called it “cruelly empty and infantile.” Terry Lawson of the Detroit Free Press said it was “another grisly puzzle with no agenda except to convince us that hell would look pretty good after spending two hours in this hole.” Nice. Yeah, people who were paid to see movies and say if they were good or bad thought Saw was pretty darn bad. Maybe they hated it because of the trends it initiated. It’s hard to say.

This must be conceded: There are aspects of Saw that are bad. The acting isn’t great (though there are a strange amount of Lost cast members in it) and some of Wan’s screechy, wooshy, heavy-metal-video directing is more WTF-ey than scary these days, but nonetheless, this movie has an enjoyable amount of merit. The plot (more than the story) is sealed up as tight as you’d hope, and the twists all land with solid, satisfying whumps. The trap scenes—less gory than you remember, though more frantic and panicky—are contrasted nicely with some inventive and original bump-in-the-night sequences. A bedroom-closet sequence stands out as particularly creepy, but the best scene in the movie, trap-centric or otherwise, involves a pitch-black apartment and a photographer’s illuminating camera flash. It’s a perfect horror scenario, and the payoff is effective, earned, and brain-searing.

The point, then, is that Saw deserves a lot more credit as a movie than you would expect given the reviews, and that’s an interesting conflict considering the moment Rotten Tomatoes is having “in the culture” right now. Hollywood players, most notably the Rock, are attacking critics when their movies don’t do well, blaming poor box office receipts on unfair feedback or a dissonance between what film snobs think and what popcorn munchers think. As Sean Fennessey articulated well on The Ringer last week, the jury’s still out on whether sites like Rotten Tomatoes can impact a movie’s bottom line, but what’s obvious regardless is that audiences and actors and directors and studios are paying attention to what critics think about their movies. In the case of something like Saw, it would seem that lay audiences chose to ignore the negative reviews and see the movie anyway (Saw made $55 million on a $1 million budget). If you wanted to go see a guy sever his foot with a hacksaw, you went, and no Ebert, Roeper, or Rodriguez was going to stop you. In a modern era where we all look to maximize our time and pursue the most satisfying experience at the lowest cost, aggregates that tell us “watch this, not that” have value. Maybe Saw’s reception would have sunk it in 2017. It’s notable it didn’t in 2004.

Saw being panned proved to be one of the most futile critical assaults of the modern era. Not only did the flick score a sizable profit, but it churned out six sequels that in turn deposited their own zero-laden checks. The de-evolution of Saw’s franchise and Saw’s gore-soaked genre is its own discussion, but taken by itself, there’s enough lessons within this single movie to flash a camera on today’s precarious, desperate-to-adapt Hollywood landscape. Exploitative, trashy, and egregious or not, Saw earned every penny it raked in, even if some would call it blood money.