I am not a fan of the Saw series. I saw the first movie in theaters back in 2004, thought it was one of the worst movies I had ever seen, and had no desire to go back for its many sequels. And yet the new spinoff, Spiral: From the Book of Saw, offered an alluring promise. As a spinoff, I wasn’t required to familiarize myself with the six sequels or the 2017 reboot Jigsaw. Plus, Spiral had the star power of actors Chris Rock and Samuel L. Jackson to spice things up, and since I was still longing to go back to the theater to see anything (seriously, right now, if you offer me a screening at a movie theater, I’m probably gonna take it), I decided to see my first Saw movie in almost two decades. Spiral still offers the gory traps that have served as the franchise’s trademark, but it would be a stretch to call it a “horror” film. Darren Lynn Bousman’s movie is more in the realm of a film like Se7en where cops are racing to stop a serial killer with a particular axe to grind. However, unlike David Fincher’s classic movie, Spiral feels redundant in its plotting even as it grasps for some vague commentary on how to deal with bad cops.
A new killer fashioned in the vein of the original Jigsaw is now targeting cops. Detective Ezekiel “Zeke” Banks (Rock), the son of the former chief Marcus Banks (Jackson), takes on the case with his new partner William Schenk (Max Minghella). Zeke is a pariah in the department because at the start of his career he turned in his partner for killing an unarmed man, but Zeke is determined to catch this new killer whose goal is to make cops pay for their corruption. As Zeke races to save fellow detectives who don’t even like him, he must also contend with being in his father’s shadow as well as being in a department that still doesn’t respect him because he broke the blue wall of silence.
Spiral is a very simple movie that feints at having something thoughtful to say. Plot-wise, the film falls into an easy pattern that feels designed to give Saw fans what they want: gruesome traps. A cop will go investigate something, that cop will get captured by the murderer, the cop will wake up in some kind of device where they must choose to inflict some kind of self-maiming or lose their life, Banks gets a body part in the mail, and the cycle starts over again. The film really doesn’t know how to push beyond that, and so it rests heavily on Rock’s charisma to carry it between traps before the inevitable reveal that is in no way shocking but attempts to explain how Spiral is different from other Saw movies.
But we really don’t even need that explanation because whether you’ve seen only one Saw or all of them, it’s generally agreed that these are horror films, specifically in the sub-genre or “torture porn” where Jigsaw would kidnap folks and make them play sadistic “games” while the audience tested their own squeamishness. Spiral, on the other hand, targets only cops (and specifically detectives or officers of a higher rank; no beat cop/uniformed officer ever ends up these traps), and while that puts it more in the vein of a crime thriller where Banks races to stop the killer rather than showing the film from the perspective of victims like previous entries, it also makes for a film that gives the illusion of commentary without saying anything.
At a glimpse, it may seem like Spiral is being particularly bold by making a movie about police corruption and the serial killer looking to put an end to bad cops, but when you think about the film for longer than five seconds, it’s not really saying anything. It’s certainly not saying anything about how the police treat Black citizens, especially when your film’s hero is a Black man. It’s not even saying much about how corruption is systemic beyond there are career consequences for breaking the blue wall of silence, but also the killer’s plan is based on punishing the “bad apples” rather than anything that would show systemic corruption beyond those individual actors. Spiral is a movie that wants credit for being About Something and it hopes it can obtain that credit by stringing together enough signifiers to give the appearance of significance.
And yet as a breezy crime-thriller mixed with Saw stuff, I found Spiral better than the original if only because it never pretends to have an emotional core. Spiral knows we’re in it for the thrills, and so it rarely tries to be anything more than gory entertainment. With Rock throwing in jokes and the crime-thriller framework, there’s no overwrought melodrama here, and while the social commentary is so thin as to be non-existent, at least it never overshadows the cheap thrills that Spiral delivers. I leave it to the die-hard fans to argue over where Spiral ranks in the pantheon of Saw movies, but for a guy who was one-and-done with this franchise, I didn’t mind this return to the game.
Rating: C