‘Saw’ could use a few cuts of its own

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but it’s also the laziest route for any creative endeavor. Such is the case with “Saw,” a grisly thriller that plays like a bargain-basement rehash of other, better movies. Which is really a shame, because there’s a very good movie that could have been generated from the few original parts of this one.

The premise behind “Saw” is a dastardly clever one that would have worked better as a short film. Two men awaken in a dingy room, shackled to pipes on opposite sides, with no memory of how they got there. The two men are Dr. Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes) and a young photographer named Adam (Leigh Whannell, who also wrote the screenplay).

Also in the room are a corpse and items that set the stage for a sadistic game: a tape recorder, a gun and two saws that are too dull for the chains but just sharp enough to hack through an ankle. The goal is simple: Dr. Gordon must find a way to kill Adam within six hours or his wife and daughter will die.

If the film had stuck with that set-up and allowed it to play out to a shocking conclusion, “Saw” would have made for some tense viewing, a slasher version of “Waiting for Godot.” Instead, Whannell and director James Wan get a little too bold and too sloppy for their own good, throwing in ham-fisted flashback sequences, a boatload of clichés, absurd coincidences and a thin subplot involving a beleaguered police detective (Danny Glover) on the trail of the evil mastermind behind it all. Alas, he turns out to be a cheap knock-off of Kevin Spacey’s John Doe psycho in “Se7en.”

All of these ill-conceived twists and turns are intended to keep the audience guessing; they’re more likely to make it confused and bewildered. The film starts to suffer from too much plot getting in the way of the story before it hits the halfway mark.

By the time “Saw” reaches its bloody climax, its reliance on comic-book serial killers, elaborate master plans, ridiculously transparent red herrings, overly complicated death devices and manic pacing has betrayed the movie for what it is and the director and writer for what they are, pretentious copycats who’ve watched their favorite splatter movies a few times too many.