When Chris Rock revealed that he’d come up with an idea to reboot the Saw franchise, it sounded like it could be exactly what the long-running horror series needed after eight increasingly repetitive installments. But Spiral: From the Book of Saw, starring and executive produced by Rock, delivers more of the same in a slightly different package. It’s not clear how much of the movie came from Rock’s original idea. He isn’t credited with the story, and the main creative team consists of Saw series veterans -- director Darren Lynn Bousman (who helmed the series’ second, third and fourth installments) and screenwriters Josh Stolberg and Peter Goldfinger (who wrote 2017’s Jigsaw).
Spiral begins like pretty much any other Saw movie, with an anonymous victim finding themselves in an elaborate death trap. Serial killer Jigsaw, aka John Kramer (Tobin Bell), famously died in 2006’s Saw III and yet remained the mastermind behind the killings in subsequent movies, via previously implemented plans and a growing squad of disciples. But Bell appears only briefly in photographs in Spiral, and the voice inviting victims to “play a game” isn’t his (it sounds vaguely female). Spiral’s first victim is strapped via his tongue to the ceiling of a subway tunnel and ends up splattered all over the tracks when he gets hit by a train.
It turns out that the dead man was a detective on the local police force and the best friend of sullen Detective Zeke Banks (Rock). Zeke and his fellow detectives pretty quickly rule out the possibility of one of Jigsaw’s accomplices committing the crime, even though it follows the basic pattern. The voice blames the victim for some moral transgression (in this case, lying on the witness stand in multiple trials), offers them an absurdly painful way to “escape” the death trap, then kills them anyway. In Spiral, the killer’s victims are all corrupt cops, and the filmmakers make some muddled, largely unsuccessful points about the failures of modern policing.
That first dead cop may have been Zeke’s buddy, but he’s otherwise not well-liked on the force, since he also once took down a corrupt officer (although in much less grisly fashion). Ever since he turned in his ex-partner for shooting an innocent unarmed civilian, Zeke has been ostracized by his fellow officers, even though his father, Marcus (Samuel L. Jackson), is a legendary former police chief. But Zeke still gets to be the lead detective on this Jigsaw-like case, joined by his new partner William Schenk (Max Minghella).
Zeke is introduced like Eddie Murphy’s Axel Foley in Beverly Hills Cop, making jokes while working undercover with a gang of thieves, only to then be busted by his own colleagues. He’s a total cop-movie cliché, getting chewed out by Capt. Angie Garza (Marisol Nichols) for being a loose cannon, not playing by the rules, etc. Of course, he prefers to work alone and is not happy to be saddled with a rookie partner. Zeke’s patter about relationships in his first scenes with William could come from a Chris Rock stand-up special, but the humor quickly disappears as the bodies pile up.
There are quite a few of the Saw series’ trademark gruesomely intricate traps, as the killer takes out more cops deemed to be unworthy of the badge, but Spiral is the least explicitly violent entry in the series since James Wan’s 2004 original. It’s more of a throwback to police procedurals of the ’80s and ’90s, as the mismatched cops find themselves always one step behind a serial killer. Spiral owes as much to David Fincher’s Seven as it does to any of the other Saw movies.
It pales in comparison to Fincher’s darkly brilliant thriller, though, and it falls somewhere in the middle of the Saw series as a whole. Rock proved that he could give a convincingly dark and serious performance in the most recent season of Fargo, but he’s terrible in Spiral, either delivering misplaced jokes at the beginning or using the same squinty look over and over again to indicate Zeke’s anguish as the movie goes on. The rest of the cast doesn’t fare much better, although Jackson at least seems to be having some fun.
As in Jigsaw, Stolberg and Goldfinger’s dialogue is atrocious, full of clumsy exposition and awkward pronouncements. The later Saw sequels relied on copious flashbacks to previous movies in order to rewrite continuity, and Bousman must miss those because he instead throws in frequent cheesy flashbacks to things that happened just a few scenes earlier. Spiral’s visual style, including fast-motion glimpses of the death traps and a reliance on sickly green lighting, is largely indistinguishable from other Saw movies. The plotting is more straightforward but also less sophisticated than in previous installments in the franchise, and it’s blatantly obvious who’ll eventually be revealed as the killer.
Jigsaw has always been a morally righteous killer, even taking on the injustices of the American healthcare system in 2009’s Saw VI, so it fits that this new iteration would have a message about the police state. But Spiral’s wokeness is weak at best, just filler to keep the audience awake between murders. At one point, characters dismiss the idea that the killer could be Jigsaw because John Kramer never targeted cops, even though he specifically chose cops as victims in multiple Saw movies. It just makes it seem like the filmmakers haven’t been paying attention to their own franchise. “Prepare to be underwhelmed,” Zeke says to William when they’re first paired up. That warning applies to anyone watching Spiral, too.
Starring Chris Rock, Max Minghella, Marisol Nichols and Samuel L. Jackson, Spiral: From the Book of Saw opens Friday, May 14 in theaters nationwide.