Every once in a while a film comes along that is so inspired in its premise, yet so inept in its execution, that it immediately becomes a classic. Not a true classic, of course, but something different. It becomes a fucked classic--a brilliant example of hackery overshadowing intelligence; a sublimely missed opportunity.

Saw, directed by James Wan, is such a film. Its premise is a golden one: Two men, a doctor named Lawrence (Cary Elwes) and an amateur photographer named Adam (Leigh Whannell), wake up in a disgusting restroom. Both have no idea how they got there, and both are chained to pipes, each on opposite sides of the filthy room. Between them lies a dead body. The body is holding a tape recorder in one hand, and a gun in the other. Both Lawrence and Adam have tapes in their pockets; Lawrence's tape tells him that if he doesn't kill Adam by a certain time, his wife and child will be dead.

This is the setup, nicely boiling down the messiness of David Fincher's Seven into a single event, and as Saw started to get rolling I had high hopes for what was to come. Sadly, those hopes were dashed once it was revealed, within the first 15 minutes, that director Wan has absolutely no talent with actors.

To call Saw a study in "ham and cheese" (to steal a line from director Paul Thomas Anderson) would be a massive understatement. Cary Elwes doesn't just chew the scenery here, he fully consumes, digests, and ejects it, delivering a performance that would be sheer comic genius if he weren't so obviously sincere. Nobody in Elwes' supporting cast fares much better, especially Danny Glover, whose performance as an obsessed detective on the trail of the film's villain slips into parody. At the screening I attended, the audience broke into laughter during a scene when Glover mourns the requisite loss of his partner, and it signaled the swap of the film from a decent horror flick with a good idea, to a must-see comic debacle. Hence this recommendation, which I encourage the film's marketing department to blurbalize: "Saw is the comedy of the year."