Starring: Cary Elwes, Leigh Whannell, Danny Glover

Creative limitations and rookie errors relegate Saw to the annals of Bad Cinema. That is, depending on your taste, an advocation on the film's behalf or a quick dismissal; still, the general thought here is that director James Wan couldn't have intended to walk such a fine line between stupid and clever. And my prevailing opinion is that he definitely shouldn't have sapped the tension created in his distressing opening scene with, well, everything that follows it.

Submerged in a bathtub, Adam (Leigh Whannell, who also wrote the screenplay) regains consciousness, flails out of a narcotic stupor as he crashes to the floor, and, thanks to a flick of the switch from a man across the room, realizes that he's in a decrepit industrial bathroom, chained at the ankle to a pipe. A good ten yards away from him is Dr. Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes) who's in a slightly more enviable predicament, as he too is chained in a similar fashion, though he's soaked in just his own sweat. It stinks, there are fluids everywhere, and a dead man lays between them with a microcassette recorder close to Adam and a gun just out of Lawrence's reach. Not much time for pleasantries, though they manage to strike somewhat of an accord before they each find a cassette tape on their person. Upon playback, they're informed that only one of them can escape death today, and "the room will become their tomb" in a matter of hours. Lawrence also learns that, should he not want his wife and young daughter to die, he will have to kill Adam. But the main clue, a heart-shape smeared on a toilet tank, uncovers the accouterments that you ultimately end up waiting to see in action -- a set of medical-grade saws created to cut through bone, not metal. Given these ominous devices, Dr. Gordon's memory is jarred, and he tells Adam that this must be a plot by the deviant known as "Jigsaw," a man who, since he doesn't directly murder his targets, is not technically regarded as a killer by the police.

It's a great twenty minutes, despite the dubious acting (Cary Elwes should take cover because his performance is an embarrassment) and considerable debt owed to David Fincher's past imaginings. The problem is, in transitioning from their set-up to the rest of the film, Wan and Whannell can't seem to function outside the bathroom. Forced exposition fuels their story-in-reverse engine, and the sets are as superficial as the dialogue between any characters aside from our main men. And before they completely abandon their "he's not a killer" premise, they build upon it in with an engaging scene involving an ex-junkie, the only woman to ever walk away from a Jigsaw plot, who tells a pair of detectives (Danny Glover and Ken Leung) that she was saved by the experience. It's a somewhat original concept, worthy of a director like Fincher (and a screenwriter like David Koepp), but in this instance it's disregarded after its introduction.

Also by constricting the number of relevant characters to approximately ten, the plot quickly boils down to Him-or-Him?, an increasingly uninvolving game. Perhaps the trick is to not think too hard, but only we, not the filmmakers, should have that option.

We'll certainly see more from Wan and Whannell. Look at The Butterfly Effect -- that's another interesting failure and those two guys get work. Regardless of this particular film's misdirections, however, I'm a Bad Cinema fan, and I'd probably go see Saws.