Every Saw Film Ranked From Worst To Best
1. Saw
Plot: Two men wake up in an abandoned bathroom with a corpse lying on the floor between them and are forced to play a terrifying game by the mysterious Jigsaw Killer.
What else was it going to be?
A ferociously suspenseful, wickedly smart and consistently unpredictable thriller with a dark and haunting story, not to mention one of the greatest twist endings of all time, Saw is one of the best horror films of the 2000s, as well as probably the second-best Torture Porn film ever made (after Takashi Miike's Audition).
Saw largely avoids the mistakes that its sequels made, since the gore is stripped down, the non-linear storytelling is done in a coherent way and the characters really feel human. Therefore, despite being the simplest and least-explicit of the series, it is still the best by some distance.
It's not a perfect film. The dialogue is occasionally clunky, there's a hilariously low-budget car chase scene and the lead performances from Cary Elwes (complete with a jarringly bad American accent) and Leigh Whannell are terrible, but the sheer strength of the story as well as James Wan's superb direction (it's an enormous shame he never directed another Saw flick) more than compensate.
Will the franchise ever top its first film? Don't count on it.
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