How far would you go to save your own life? A young man named Adam wakes to find himself chained to a rusty pipe inside a decrepit subterranean chamber. Chained to the opposite side of the room is another bewildered captive, Dr. Lawrence Gordon. Between them is a dead man lying in a pool of blood, holding a .38 in his hand. Neither man knows why he has been abducted; but instructions left on a microcassette order Dr. Gordon to kill Adam within eight hours. If he fails to do so, then both men will die, and Dr. Gordon's wife, Alison, and his daughter will be killed. Recalling a recent murder investigation by a police detective named Tapp, Dr. Gordon realizes he and Adam are the next victims of a psychopathic genius known only as "Jigsaw." Jigsaw likes to play games with his victims that evolve elaborate ways for them to find ways to kill themselves to try and teach them how valuable it is to be alive, something his victims have been taking for granted. With only a few hours left to spare, they must unravel the elaborate puzzle of their fate in the midst of mounting terror. The killer has provided them with only a few clues and two handsaws - too weak to break their steel shackles, but strong enough to cut through flesh and bone.

For a movie with such a clever premise and ingenious plot the movie is quite lacking. It’s not the plot nor the premise that fails in the movie it is the execution. The movie at times just seems to interested in a telling a gory story rather than using suspense and thrills to move the story along. The movie could have been so much better had they used the basic premise of any Alfred Hitchcock film, and that is to let the audiences imagination run away with them and show as little as possible, but rather the movie prefers to glorify in the gore of the film and it leaves nothing to the imagination except its very weak ending that concludes nothing. Which to me is amazing as the movie had no problem up until then in glorifying in blood and guts but now it gets queasy at ending the movie right.

Where the movie probably truly fails is in the acting, which is so horrible at times that the audience was laughing at moments that were suppose to be dramatic and suspenseful. When an audience finds humor in how bad the actors are that is a good sign that the rest of the movie is only going to be mediocre at best. Cary Elwes does one of the most amazing impersonations of a hack actor that I have seen in a movie in awhile. In fact the best acting in the movie is when Leigh Whannell is doing an acting job for the killer, that is suppose to be bad, which is ironic the only time the acting is good is when they were acting like bad actors, which probably wasn’t that much of a stretch for them. The movie has a great plot, a good story but really bad acting and terrible execution, making the movie mediocre.
2 stars out of 5