saw
Didn't see this one in theaters, but I just finished it for the second time on dvd. Not really what I had expected, which is both good and bad.
I had expected yet another movie shooting for the title of goriest movie of all time. This one was surprisingly tame, by that standard; I had expected close-ups of people getting limbs hacked off and such, but they generally cut away from stuff like that. Low budget, perhaps.
Instead, this shot for a tension-type horror flick. It started out with what could be a great premise. The confinement theme has been done, but not overdone, I don't think. It requires fantastic scripting and acting to make it work; there's no distractions in that type of film. No fancy effects or tricks, just pure story and acting.
And that's where this one falls short. I give them an A for effort, but the final effect isn't so great. The acting by the supporting cast (including Danny Glover, as well as a wife and kid, and a crazy villian) was fantastic. Unfortunatly, none of that matters. The entire movie revolves around the two guys in the room. And that's where the movie falls apart, at the crux of the theme: Neither of the guys playing those parts were up for the task presented to them, and they weren't helped by whoever wrote their script. They didn't do a bad job, per se, but a rather mediocre one; and since the whole movie revolves around those scenes, it creates a rather mediocre movie.
I liked it, I enjoyed it to a certain extent, but I never got really into it. In a really good movie, the audience should forget they're watching a movie. In this one, the scripting and acting flaws never let me forget that I was watching a movie.
Overall, not bad, not good. A C+ effort, ranking the "+" only for original concept rather than execution.
