Word: killingly
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...know the Saw series, and if you don't, some teenager in your family does. The first movie, released two years ago this weekend, was the one with two guys in a room, and to keep his wife and child alive one of them is told he has to kill the other one, and to do that he must saw off his foot. And their disturbed jailer is a master strategist who mistreats them the way an angry kid does his toys. When Jigsaw, their torturer, says, "I want to play a game," it's a game of life...
...Just hearing that plot precis must have given parents the cold sweats. Another slasher movie to desensitize their young sons: to demonstrate acts of self-mutilation beyond the dreams of Jackass, and teach them that the world offers only two options: kill...
...game. Will Lawrence hack through it in order to save his family? And kill another man in the process? "If you do not kill Adam by six o'clock," the torturer, Jigsaw, says on a tape recording, "then Alison and Diana [Lawrence's wife and child] will die, and I will leave you in this room to rot. Let the game begin." It's Jigsaw's favorite, and only, game: confining his victim in some medieval-looking device made of old found objects (the movie takes its anachronistic notion of production design from Terry Gilliam's Brazil), then telling...
...Because it's as ingenious, and remorseless, as its twisted villain. The brilliant, devious psycho-shadow, dreaming up ways for his victims to kill themselves, is a sepulchral stand-in for the writer (Whannel on all three films) and the director (James Wan on the first, Darren Lynn Bousman on the next two). They are playing the same murderous mind games on the audience - which is trapped, not in a urinal dungeon or a booby-trapped house, but in the darkness of a movie theater or rec room...
...acting, than screaming in agony and shouting in rage. Whannel (who is charm personified when chatting about the film on the DVD featurette) and Elwes can't manage the crucial middle range of emotions the two men have to feel in the moments when they're not trying to kill each other or save themselves...