A few years ago, I saw a tweet describing not only that a potential update to the Saw franchise was coming, but that Chris Rock was to star in it. Not only that, but Chris Rock himself had pitched a Saw movie idea so wild that Lionsgate jumped at the chance to bring the franchise back. I’m not sure how much of that is true or just Twitter hyperbole, but if any of it is true, it sure is a compelling reason to bring the franchise back.
You see, the Saw franchise is all about legacy. The first few films feature a living John Kramer (Tobin Bell), the Jigsaw Killer, but eventually, after his death (spoilers, I suppose?) much of the drama in the series revolves around the jockeying for position from all of Jigsaw’s numerous apprentices wanting to take on the mantle and live on as the one true Jigsaw.
In much the same way, 2017’s Jigsaw attempted to resurrect the Saw legacy but fell pretty much flat. It came and went without much of a whisper, which, for an industry that is so good at raising dead franchises from the dead in order to appeal to bankable nostalgia, was somewhat odd.
So here we have Spiral, helmed by Saw II, Saw III, and Saw IV director, Darren Lynn Bousman (again, legacy amiright?), attempting to take on that mantle of legacy and become the new heir to the Saw empire. But instead of going the Jigsaw route, Spiral takes a left and delivers something that feels pretty different from the rest of the Saw films–for better, or for worse.
In Spiral, Detective Ezekiel “Zeke” Banks (Chris Rock) is on the outs in his precinct. After turning his partner in for gross misconduct, his entire department sees him as a rat and he has largely turned to off-the-books undercover work in order to bring in the bad guys. Eventually, his police chief slaps him with a new rookie partner to get his act in line, Detective William Schenck (The Handmaid’s Tale’s Max Minghella). But soon, as cops’ bodies start to pile up and the similarities to Jigsaw’s methods in those murders begin to become more and more apparent, Banks finds himself caught in a cat-and-mouse game with a new killer.
But even with a new killer, the real stars of the show are still around: Spiral doesn’t skimp on traps, the bread and butter of the franchise. But what’s unique about Spiral, is that where previous entries into the Saw canon focused mainly on a single, large-scale “game” hosted by Jigsaw (or whoever had taken on his mantle at that point), Spiral decides to focus on the police, not just because they are attempting to solve the case, but because they are the victims. In fact, Spiral feels much more like a spiritual successor to Se7en than it does a Saw film. Because while much of the Saw franchise has revolved around mystery, Spiral feels somewhat dull when it comes to mystery and it doesn’t lean into its traps enough to be entertaining in the in-between moments of the case.
Even with the traps involved, the new killer (named Spiral, I’m assuming?) is hardly terrifying. They don a pig mask and a hooded robe (okay, kind of frightening) but have a voice that sounds like that of a teenage girl that was run through a distortion filter on a MacBook Pro. There are not enough clues to unravel, and it feels more like a guided tour of an investigation instead of a complex web of clues that could lead to multiple different outcomes. I never felt a moment in the film where I felt fairly convinced that multiple people could be involved because the mystery doesn’t want to be solved.
But the film’s newest spin on the franchise is probably the thing that will bring it the most heat from some fans and that is its attempt at some social commentary (something that the previous films often steered away from). The film’s killer isn’t simply killing off cops for the sake of killing cops, but instead sees a corrupt institution and an even more corrupt department and seeks to, in the spirit of Jigsaw, punish them for their sins.
While this commentary isn’t necessarily misdirected, it doesn’t ever really land and it feels more of an indictment of the police in the film (one notoriously lies on the stand in court, another shoots a witness to cover up for another officer) rather than one that can speak beyond the screen and say something about the ways in which “one bad apple” (as bad cops are often referred to as) can end up “spoiling the bunch” and a department can rot from the inside out. It does, however, end in a finale that seems to not really be the final footnote that it wants to be (you’ll know it when you see it).
Chris Rock is…fine as Banks. He’s not too hard to buy as a detective on the outs and he injects some lively Chris Rock-style humor into the film, performing his own little bit on Forrest Gump and dropping a one-liner here and there that never fell too out of place. Minghella continues to be an impressive actor, but Samuel L. Jackson, who plays Zeke’s father and ex-captain of the police department, Marcus Banks, seems a lot more like a “hey, we can get Samuel L. for a couple of days” than a deliberate choice. In a film like Saw, you cast Jackson if you are going to utilize Jackson to his fullest, not relegate him to 8 minutes of screentime.
If Spiral has taught me anything, it’s only reinforced what I learned after watching 2017’s Jigsaw…Tobin Bell is the heart and soul of this franchise, so if you don’t have him front and center, maybe don’t make a Saw movie.
RATING: C
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