Reviews

Plot: Jaguar Paw gets captured. Jaguar Paw runs away. Spaniards land.

--and that's about it, except for the subplot with Jaguar Paw's pregnant wife and child, which goes like this: they're in a hole. They get out at the end.

Seriously, I did not find enough story in this movie to fill 90 minutes, much less the 2 hours plus that it consumes. People who complain about how violent it is are probably doing so because of how long and drawn out the bloodletting scenes are. I've seen worse gore, but the scene of human sacrifice takes up ten minutes, where all we learn is, a human sacrifice is taking place. Seeing someone cut their finger would be off-putting if I had to stare at it for that long.

That scene, and all the ones leading up to it, are so predictable that they could be compressed into ten or fifteen minutes total to get to the start of the story. The real story starts when Jaguar Paw is given a "Most Dangerous Game" chance at survival, but even then, there aren't really any plot twists. He gradually whittles down his pursuers as they chase him through his home forest. But even at this point, there are only so many frames I want to watch of the hero running away through trees and rivers.

Someone (can't remember who) once said that action isn't just motion, but it seems that Mr. Gibson and Mr. Safinia don't understand that. This movie offers plentiful motion, but little of the surprises, revelations, or character reversals that turn it into a captivating story.

This movie didn't suck, and the acting was great all around. That's about all the good I can say about it. I would have enjoyed it as a halfway-decent thriller or a courtroom drama more if it hadn't claimed to be based on a real story. But when Laura Linney says during trial that "this case is not about facts," that summed up about everything wrong with the religious apologists I've seen in the media lately, from George W. Bush to the Kansas Board of Education. This idea that facts don't matter has poisoned cultural discourse for the last decade or more: some people seem to think that, as long as we have Faith, our negligent fact-checking won't lead to any wrongdoing.

It would be one thing if writer/director Scott Derrickson and co-writer Paul Harris Boardman simply presented the "facts don't matter" tactic as part of the defense's legal strategy, but they add details to the story that try to shore this argument up. To its credit, the story concludes with the priest being found guilty of negligent manslaughter, which is apparently what happened in the real-life case in Germany. Weighing against this are the made-up story details about Linney's and Tom Wilkinson's characters being plagued by evil signs and visions, and the attending physician being killed just as he tells Linney that he sees the demons. Combined with Hollywood pop-psychology ("schizophrenics never know they're schizophrenic"), these would be workable, if clichéd, in a movie that admitted it was solely fiction, but here they serve only as a crutch to prop up the sagging drama and as evidence of the screenwriters' bias.

The acting was excellent, but, not having seen Hellraiser: Inferno, I can't say that this is due to the direction. I do know that Laura Linney has handled herself well before in Mystic River and You Can Count on Me, and Tom Wilkinson was great in In the Bedroom and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; here, they clearly pick up the slack left by the script. Wilkinson, in particular, plays the best Flawed Holy Avenger since Jason Miller. It is not an easy thing to come up with a convincing character when the story around you is thin, but they manage to do it. Relative newcomer Jennifer Carpenter did fine as Emily, although her role consisted mostly of contorting herself and screaming hysterically. I really felt for her at moments, thinking that, regardless of whether it was demons or psychosis that ailed her, it was horrifying to think what she must have been going through.

That emotional level got me through the movie. The storytelling shortcuts and the intellectual dishonesty grated against me, but I was able to cope with it for the two hours or so that I sat there. If only it hadn't claimed to be based on real events, it could have told a better story, and more honestly.

Two men, Lawrence and Adam, a physician and a photographer respectively, awake to find themselves chained to the opposite ends of an abandoned restroom. Between them, out of reach, is a dead body, and scattered about the room are clues as to their abductor's identity; the doctor (played by Cary Elwes) figures out that it must be the "Jigsaw Killer", who places his victims in traps where they must kill or risk death in order to escape. The woman from the movie's publicity posters is the best example of this: her head has been placed in a "reverse bear trap" that will crash through her skull unless she can cut the key out from another victim's stomach in time.

I got the same feeling watching Saw as I did watching Jeepers Creepers. Started out great, and fifteen minutes into it, I thought I was watching the Next Great Horror Movie. Then the whole thing plummeted rapidly and never got turned around again. Admittedly, Saw started its decline later than Jeepers Creepers did. For most of the movie I felt the rising tension that a horror movie is supposed to evoke. But when the story neared its conclusion and we see how it all got started, I couldn't see how this movie got off the ground without a major re-write. The following is a list of spoilers, so if you still want to see it, read no further. But in order to explain why the movie was such a disappointment, spoilers are necessary.

SPOILER 1: The villain "Jigsaw" is really a cancer patient--yes, a CANCER PATIENT--who looks like he's been on chemo for about six months. And he's supposed to be able to overpower everyone in the movie, including a much younger and fitter Adam (Leigh Wannell). Huh? If someone looked as bad as he did in his early hospital bed scene, I can't imagine him getting up and walking without assistance, but here he is enacting his evil schemes on people who should be able to beat him up with one arm tied behind their backs.

SPOILER 2: "Jigsaw" is also the 'corpse' in the middle of the room, lying between the two men. He plays dead. For seven hours. Next to a medical doctor who has examined him before, for heaven's sake. It strains credulity that the ruse could go on for that long, no matter how panicked Elwes is supposed to be. In seven hours he never notices the man breathing or moving, even when Jigsaw responds to his actions. (At one point, Adam gets electroshocked to see if he is faking his own death.) And Adam at first doesn't seem to recognize the doctor, even though we later find out he has been tailing him and photographing him for some time. If they were blindfolded, it would make sense. They aren't, and it doesn't.

SPOILER 3: The plot hinges on too many people doing too many stupid things. Wannell's character thinks there's someone in his apartment; he doesn't get out and call the police or anything, but tries some ripped-off-from-Rear-Window trick with his photo flash. Well, in Rear Window, Jimmy Stewart only tried that trick because he was a paraplegic and had no other options; in this movie it's just plain dumb. And the cops don't act like cops, they act like Nancy Drew and let the villain get away, getting one of themselves killed in the process and the other (played by Danny Glover, who must have some blackmail photos hanging over him to be in this movie) seriously injured.

All in all a great, horrific premise that got mangled because Wan and Wannell (who wrote and co-starred) wanted a 'dark' and surprising ending, but couldn't or wouldn't think up an ending that lived up to the initial premise.