Dead Silence (2007)

As if Saw wasn't sharp enough evidence, here's Dead Silence to prove two things: Saw franchise patriarchs Leigh Whannell and James Wan are terrible writers and Wan is also a terrible director. The sheer dopiness of this film can be summed up not in the fact that it's a killer-doll movie with no killer dolls but that Donnie Wahlberg has a running-gag character trait (he carries an electric razor with him at all times) that mishandled to the point where it doesn't even qualify as a gag. Wan, meanwhile, has no feel for how to build tension or suspense, hitting his marks either way too early or way too late (the "come closer" scene is a hilarious example of the latter). There's also a twist that tries to be clever but achieves the polar opposite; upon figuring out part of the ending ahead of time, I remarked that if Wan and Whannell actually did it that it would be so stupid as to be kind of awesome, yet the execution went so far into stupid that any awesome was immediately extinguished. Acting uniformly terrible, dialogue wooden bordering on unrecitable... why did I bother with this again?

Grade: D