Rating: 🐷💀🤷

Need a primer on the first 8 SAWs? We got you covered.

Saw films are an increasingly rare treat since the franchise’s “conclusion” in 2010. Saw 3D, also known as Saw VII, also also erroneously dubbed The Final Chapter, entombed the annual onslaught of strange tortures and stranger storytelling techniques with a metal clang, seemingly sealing the seven-year game out of sight forever. It was another seven years before the dismemberment began again with quasi-sequel Jigsaw - the respectable, HD Dexter-esque reskin of a series which previously spoke in garish color filters and hyperstylized urban decay. Now the gears have spun again to bring us Spiral (colon, From the Book of Saw), a politically murky rebootquel which recalls the golden days of Jigsaw’s bloodletting in its visual style, but stumbles in the thematic and narrative department.

To be sure, Spiral’s story structure is pure Saw, openly cribbing the Seven-type vibe which also defined the previous films. Chris Rock’s Detective “Zeke” Banks trails a cop-killing Jigsaw imitator, who seems hellbent on dispatching corrupt officers with the most gruesome games imaginable. His trust in fellow police shattered after harassment from reporting a dirty coworker, Zeke must track these killings through a hokey procedural while looking over his shoulder and dodging suspicion. In addition, he grapples with Samuel L. Jackson-flavored daddy problems and attempts to escape his father’s legacy of violence. Bodies accumulate, a new weirdo puppet appears, and nothing is as it seems. Can Zeke stop the new Jigsaw and contend with the fact that cops fucking suck, actually? Well…… I won’t spoil it! It’s on you to find out.

Those in the loop might immediately ping a pretty big obtrusion on this particular radar, namely, the edgelord comedy torture franchise doing a thesis on police brutality and corruption in the year of our lord 2021. The Saw films are more or less no stranger to political statements - Saw VI especially took aim at the American healthcare system with all the nuance of a Saturday morning cartoon. While the commentary worked in a movie which was more Looney Tunes than Hostel, Spiral wants you to believe its blood-soaked, questionably ACAB manifesto is the most urgent, mind-blowing piece of social horror filmmaking since Romero put Barbra and Johnny in a graveyard. I can assure you that it is not.

Not for lack of trying, though - Spiral packs all chambers with overreaching, unbelievably loaded images, plot beats, and dialogue. Connecting the franchise’s long obsession with pig imagery to corrupt cops is an easy dunk, but everything else wibbles between grimaces and audible “oofs” in the theater. Intense police brutality with the production quality of a TV soap, a Chris Rock thin blue line diatribe against “woke” culture, and a moment of suicide-by-cop which inspires the simultaneous nervous giggling and abject horror only a truly brain-dead, dick-out, capital a Audacious film could manage. To top it all off, a character says a dirty officer has “had his foot on the neck of this community for too long.” Fuckin’ yikes!!!

Though all Spiral’s nonsense ostensibly serves a conclusion which delivers justice to bastards, and peels back the skin on the inherent horror of police, it’s never quite as convincing as it should be. The film still asks us to empathize with Chris Rock, a cop who can’t stop waxing poetic about how hard :( it is :( to be a cop :( in our current landscape :(. He still gets to riff about how comedians can’t make jokes anymore, and despite being a total asshole he’s still “the good cop,” who’s suffering for trying to make the force “a better place.” The narrative may posture as anti-police, but it stands hand-in-hand with reactionary politics and the series’ longstanding copaganda mindset. This turns up most evidently in the film’s take on Jigsaw, Spiral’s most interesting and frustrating element.

Jigsaw and his disciples have always been sociopolitical boogeymen, a sort of death cult of personas used to reflect whatever hot topic is simmering under America’s lid. John Kramer, the original Jigsaw, was a shroud of the healthcare system and its exploitation. The game conductor of 2017’s Jigsaw was a disposed, traumatized military veteran, another piece of debris from the American empire. The mastermind of Spiral is a victim of police brutality, and is younger, hotter, and woker than ever before. Simply put, it’s millennial Jigsaw - and therein lies the problem.

By making Spiral’s villain a politically-minded operative of the scapegoat generation, the film asks you, unambiguously, to choose a side. Do you stand with Chris Rock, the bastion of classic policing who, gosh darn it, might not be “woke” but is trying his best to make this whole cop thing great again, or do you go with the millennial who is more violent, more extreme, and who infuses their Jigsaw persona with a genderless, depressive androgyny? Certainly there’s nothing here which could draw negative parallels to real life, right? Certainly in its quest to splatter some cop guts on the screen, Spiral doesn’t actively demonize the people who are often trying their hardest to organize and stop the exact thing the movie is railing against…...right? Right???

I think, on some level, there’s the argument that Saw sequels are meant to be gory romps which empathize the viewer with the killer instead of the shithead victims. However, there’s not enough narrative context for that to fly in Spiral, unlike, say, Saw II, III, V, or VI. Those films all spend quite a bit of time building up and focusing on Jigsaw and his freakass cohorts, but Spiral is firmly Chris Rock’s show. The entire narrative hinges on his investigation into these killings, and his jokes at crime scenes, and his “just smelled a fart” serious face, and his tepid daddy issues subplot, so there’s barely any time for Jigsaw shenanigans. Truly honestly barely any time; the screentime for traps is minimal at best, with one even cutting away to another scene in the middle. Horrendous.

The traps and visual stylization look the best they ever have though, so hey, good news! If you like people getting ripped apart and masticated by heavy machinery, Spiral hits big in very, very small amounts. The opening trap in particular is a homerun, bringing back the scuzzy CRT screens of films past, some gross color filters, and a fuckload of blood. Returning franchise director Darren Lynn Bousman’s greatest contribution to this sideshow is his obvious talent for the classic nasty industrial “Saw style,” an element sorely lacking from Jigsaw. Otherwise, Spiral is a bit of a mess, and not necessarily the fun type. I’m always willing to watch more from this franchise, but I don’t need a both-sidesing on policing - even if it also features some very funny and very hacky cop movie tropes. C’est la vie, and game over.

Also, one more for the road -

Jigsometer: Disappointing. The eventual Jigsaw twist is absurdly easy to predict, and Spiral is hell-bent on avoiding any actual fanservice. No real narrative or visual references to prior films, no absurd lore, and not even a Marvel Cinematic Universe-style mention of an obscure character name. That said, I absolutely adore the new Jigsaw voice. Synthesized and uncanny, it’s a pathetic and weird burble that strikes an entirely different chord than Tobin Bell’s ominous growl. Probably the most depressed a computer’s sounded since Radiohead dropped “Fitter Happier.”

Billy Quotient: Zero. Zilch. Goose egg. Nada. Again, this film has the visual trappings of an old Saw but none of the classic content. As noted, there’s a new puppet in play: a cobbled-together, disgusting little pig in a cop outfit known as “Mr. Snuggles.” I love the way this marionette looks, but he doesn’t speak with Jigsaw’s voice and doesn’t do much aside from look fucked-up and wiggle around during inserts. I have to assume Billy was busy honeymooning with Slappy from Goosebumps at the time of filming.

Best Trap: Oh man. Honestly, they’re all pretty wicked. I got really, really excited when I thought someone was about to get their ass got by a “This Machine Destroys EVERYTHING” type grinder, but still had a great time when it started chewing up glass and shooting it at the guy Danganronpa machine-pitch style. I’m going with the aforementioned opening “Subway Trap,” because it’s gnarly and fun and I was pretty appropriately stoned for Spiral’s beginning stretch. Highly recommend toking up and going to see a dude’s tongue get ripped off on a fifty-five foot screen, if you’re able.

Lesson Learned: Holy hell, can someone please let Samuel L. Jackson retire?

SPIRAL Says ACAB…...Maybe