Why is it that whenever Cary Elwes plays an American, it always seems that the accent requires him to pretend as though somebody is shoving a lead pipe up his anus?

In "Saw," Dr. Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes) and Adam (Leigh Whannell) wake up in a dirty room. They are both chained to opposite walls and a dead man lies between them in a pool of blood. The dead man is holding a gun and a tape recorder. Here begins the most ridiculously contrived horror film of all time. It's a movie whose horror is impossible to follow because the set-ups required to put all the action together are so completely stupid. It hurts to think about them. I honestly think the filmmakers figured out that if they made the situations in the movie impossibly elaborate, nobody would bother to try and figure them out.

So, suffice it to say that some psychopath has stuck Dr. Gordon and Adam in the room and has created a game for them. Basically, if Dr. Gordon doesn't figure out a way to kill Adam in a few hours, the killer will slaughter Dr. Gordon's wife and daughter. I won't even bother to describe the number of things that could have gone wrong with the killer's plan, but the whole plot plays out like a collage pasted to a wall with some really weak glue.

Through flashbacks, we discover a little bit about how Dr. Gordon and Adam got to the room, and also some clues, like glimpses of people who might be the killer, which includes just about everybody. We learn that Detective David Tap (Danny Glover) is trying to catch the so-called Jigsaw Killer and that past cases have proved frustrating. Tap might be the killer or some guy in Dr. Gordon's hospital might be the killer or Dr. Gordon himself might be the killer. Frankly, I didn't really care.

Between laughing at the elaborate game and marveling at Cary Elwes's impression of a mannequin with a moving jaw, it was hard to take any of this seriously. The most effective scene in the entire film happens when Adam sticks his hand in a dirty toilet bowl. Now how much imagination does that take?

If only somebody had flushed this film before it hit theaters.