Spiral barely even cracks a smile, and stripped of any significant opportunities to show of his comedic chops, Rock just ends up feeling like one of the vaguely recognisable D-listers who tend to populate this franchise, taking up space but not really doing much else. He's not really much of an actor, is the thing, and when he's good in movies it's because his comic skills are well-suited to the tenor of the piece. So we would not have this film without Rock, in theory, which makes it too bad that it suffers from his presence. Zeke is played by Chris Rock, the primary instigator of the film's development apparently, Rock is a Saw fan, and he happened to meet a top-level Lionsgate executive at a wedding who was interested in his pitch to star in a relaunch of the franchise.
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Longtime series fans will be unsurprised to learn that he manages to suffer both of those fates at once.Ĭut to Detective Zeke Banks, the proverbial One Good Cop who we learn in the form of some amazingly blunt dialogue early on has gotten everybody in the Saw City PD mad at him for electing not to look the other way at the widespread police corruption. And a recording has been left for him: jump off the chair, and rip out his tongue - the tongue that he has used to give false testimony in criminal trials - or get splatted by a subway train in about 90 seconds. Or are they? In that aforementioned opening scene, a certain Detective Marv Boswick (Daniel Petronijevic) is attacked by a figure in a pig mask in the city's sewers, and finds himself suspended by his tongue in a metal harness on a rickety chair, right in the middle of subway tracks. The story this time takes place a good decade or more after the main trunk of the franchise, with the Jigsaw Killer long dead, and the residents of Saw City freed from the scourge of moralistic death traps providing ironic karmic comeuppance to people who have been very naughty. They're short, relatively clean, thoroughly unmemorable, and as a result they feel a bit like an appendix, a vestige of some earlier form that at present serves no purpose other than to get in the way. The death scenes in Spiral certainly earn an R-rating, but other than one that punctuates the opening scene (easily the film's highlight), they just don't have the squishy grandiosity of their forebears. Say whatever one will about these movies, if one wants to watch horribly excessive deaths, conceived with garish cruelty and executed with a splendid quantity of stage blood and latex body parts being mutilated, they deliver in spades. Spiral is one bad decision after another, the worst being that in attempting to avoid making a normal Saw movie, the filmmakers abandoned the franchise's handful of strengths while diving headfirst into its flaws. Frankly, Jigsaw is the better film, even if it's more conservative: it may just be running the formula, but it runs it successfully. Sadly, despite my tepid admiration for Bousman and writers Josh Stolberg & Pete Goldfinger, in their attempt to do something new with Saw, goes pretty much as far as "well, it's nice they tried". And that's just silly - it nudges the formula but it doesn't stray that far from what the franchise has included before.
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Director Darren Lynn Bousman, making his fourth movie in the series and his first since 2007's Saw IV, has been fairly vocal in suggesting that we shouldn't even think of this as a Saw movie at all, but a different thing taking place in the shadow of that franchise. Spiral switches back to the warehouses, but otherwise it's a genuine attempt to do something with the franchise material that's at least a few degrees different, both as a story and as a catalogue of grotesque gore effects. 2017's Jigsaw was a little bit skittish, doing absolutely nothing to tweak or freshen up the formula of the seven films that were once mainstays of the October movie calendar from 2004 to 2010, other than moving the action from the decaying industrial warehouses of a dying city to a rotting old barn in a desiccated farmland.
If there is one nice thing I can say about the threateningly-titled Spiral: From the Book of Saw - and I do think it is just the one thing - it's that this represents a much braver attempt to haul the old Saw franchise back into the public eye than the last one.
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