Though it may feel like the wait between Jigsaw — the last and not-terrible entry into the somehow still-kicking Saw franchise — and Darren Lynn Bousman’s Spiral: From the Book of Saw lasted nearly as long as the wait between Saw 3D and the former film, it actually hasn’t been that long. Had it come out when it was originally scheduled to in May 2020, it might have actually felt less like a legacy sequel and more just like a good ol’ fashioned in-continuity reboot, but the added distance of that extra lost year makes it feel, at first glance, like Spiral is a big step forward for the franchise. For what might be the first time, they have a legitimate killer app: The presence of real, marketable movie stars like Chris Rock (who, though he’s not credited as a writer, wrote a treatment for the film as well), Samuel L. Jackson, and Max Minghella, who offer a bit of prestige similar in the way that having Telly Savalas show up in your Spaghetti Western meant that people might actually watch it. But with Rock’s presence, especially as a creative force behind this project, comes the expectation of meaning, or at least some modicum of entertainment beyond the fantastic and bloody traps that Bousman and his second-unit directors come up with. Sadly, Spiral doesn’t quite live up to that pedigree: It’s more of the same Saw, but without the polish or, more importantly, genuine batshit deranged insanity lurking behind each corner.
Make no mistake: Spiral is set in the Saw universe proper, though it’s weirder aspects are often elided over in the desire to make things feel as fresh as possible. Then again, the Jigsaw Killer has been dead for a decade, and if you happen to be a film specifically named after him, well, congratulations, you’ve been retconned out of existence, replaced by Zeke Banks (Rock), a detective who’s hated by every member of his precinct for ratting out a fellow cop years ago after he watched him murder a witness in cold blood. Banks is a hard-living cynic in the middle of a custody battle, which makes for some fun conflict between him and his new partner (Minghalla), and he’s dealing with some serious daddy issues, thanks to his father (Jackson), a decorated former police captain who still lets him live rent-free in a building that he owns downtown. But when cops start turning up dead from elaborate traps, soon followed by taunting messages from the killer, Banks realizes he might be dealing with the next iteration of the Jigsaw Killer, who may or may not play by the same rules as the old one.
As expected, Rock’s the weird and unstable element at work here, and you can feel him kicking against the Saw formula at every turn. He’s easily the biggest star that the series has ever had (sorry, Donnie Wahlberg): His presence overwhelms nearly every other member of the cast not named Minghella or Jackson, and it often feels as if the three had accidentally shown up to the wrong set one day and decided just to roll with it. Yet the fit is an awkward one. The franchise has always had a weird relationship with humor, given that the only things you could really be laughing about at any moment were the ridiculous nature of the traps themselves and/or the performances of Canada’s Best Regional Theatre Actors that filled out the cast, and though a whole lot of his stuff is funny from scene to scene (though a lengthy New Jack City homage may cause you to roll your eyes out of your skull), it feels exceptionally bizarre in this context. I wouldn’t describe his performance so much as ironic as it is sportingly campy, and that’s not meant as an insult. He knows the kind of film he’s in and is playing to the cheap seats stacked with those that have come to see a Chris Rock Saw Movie, but the heavy artifice of the world around him — for example, the city he spends his time policing never even gets a name — makes his specific brand of hyperactive aggressiveness stand out from the blandness.
Perhaps that’s the fault of the screenwriters, Josh Stolberg and Peter Goldfinger, who seem genuinely uninterested in capitalizing on the fact that they’re making politically-charged horror in an era like ours, where overtly political genre films are advertised as such and made in order to be as obvious as possible. At first glance, it seems like they very well might be a little more ambitious with Spiral: after all, a pig-masked killer torturing corrupt cops to death could be, at the very least, fodder for something interesting, but the cops here are as bland and cookie-cutter as they come, and the reasons for their predicaments are often unsatisfying. One guy lied on the stand. Another helped conceal department corruption. Another got a fellow cop shot for not responding as soon as they should. All this seems very, very quaint and precious in a world in which we’re regularly shown the consequences of letting “bad apples” further spoil an already-rotting bunch, and it’s made even worse here by how shoddily Bousman films the one segment meant to directly recall dashcam footage of police murder in the viewer’s mind.
Again, this might have flown in 2004 as incisive political criticism in the genre, but this is a very, very different environment than the one that the Saw franchise was born into, given that during the Bush years, the primary way one read a film as either a newspaper critic or average moviegoer was whether or not it hued to the GOP line or not (remember when Revenge of the Sith got a bit of conservative backlash because Anakin Skywalker said something that vaguely sounded like something Bush did?). Eli Roth’s Hostel was the film that was aggressively bringing up memories of Abu Ghrab and rubbing our faces in the hideous nature of our misdeeds on the world stage, and, though it’s a frequently quoted bit of criticism online these days when commenters are trying to ascribe greater meaning to the franchise, remember that it took three sequels for Jigsaw’s lapsed health insurance to be included in the ever-growing list of post hoc changes to the ethos behind his “games.” The Saw films always worked best as a series of simple morality plays ultimately jumbled together into a fascinating and deranged continuity. Nearly all of that is absent from Spiral, and what one might have hoped to replace it isn’t there either.
“But the gore,” I can practically hear you say through the computer screen, “No one cares about politics when they go see a Saw movie.” And, sure, some of the gory Rube Goldberg machines are fun, with the film’s first kill — a brutal contraption involving a tongue clamp, a subway, and a desperate detective — being worthy of inclusion in the Greatest Hits collection like the least offensive new single from an aging band’s recent record. Still, there’s plenty here that doesn’t work. For instance, the deck is inherently stacked against any of the participants, unlike in the previous films, which takes away the suspense. For whatever reason, Bousman decided to film a number of the sequences in Spiral as flashbacks, which shows his hand to the audience and clues them in early on that the “you live or you die” choice has already been made in many of these circumstances, given that Rock and company are on-screen investigating the area in the present. And, try as you might, you may be able to take Bousman out of the Aughts, but you’ll never take the Aughts out of Bousman, which means the classical fast-cut stylings of the original films are preserved here as if they were the mosquitos in John Hammond’s cane. It still hasn’t solidified into an amber-like nostalgic affection for me quite yet, though you might feel differently.
It’s liable that we’ll be seeing plenty more of Rock’s take on the franchise, given its traditionally abrupt ending and all the implied sequel possibilities that a moment like the one that Bousman and company leave us with. The question is whether or not you’ll want more Spiral in its present form, and I, personally, would say no. But if it must continue, I wish that the brain trust behind this new iteration of the franchise would choose a direction: Either shoot your shot and go in as directly political as something like the Purge franchise, which frequently tests the limits of non-prestige blockbuster horror’s capacity for radical thought or revert to the simple pleasures of the franchise and give us the wildest, most unhinged shit imaginable in the kills and pray to God that the screenwriters can string them all together into something semi-coherent. Either option is fine, but inaction isn’t — if we keep going straight in through the middle of this fork in the road, we’re gonna crash the damn car.