Spiral (2021)

Score: 2.5 / 5

Right around the halfway point of this movie, I started feeling a little sick. Not because of the graphic violence, which of course makes anyone squeamish, nor because of the sadistic bent of movies in this franchise. But a gnawing, churning sensation gripped me somewhere below my heart but above my diaphragm. It bothered me to distraction, ringing in my ear like a cold, hard steel cage that wouldn't stop rattling. And right around the time the movie tipped inevitably to its second act, I recognized the feeling all too well: knobbly, gnarled disappointment.

Spiral looked like something new. Sure, it's a spin-off of one of the most recognizable franchises in the last two decades, but between its stars, late date, and effective marketing campaign, I was sure this would shed new lights on a long-dead franchise. Frankly, I hated all of the Saw series after the first three, and even the third teetered on the edge of my disdain; the first is a work of pure genius, while the second is a fun extension of its concepts. But Spiral, subtitled "From the Book of Saw" told me that, while it would concern a serial killer copycat, it would bear little direct resemblance to the earlier films. But this new installment features no novelty, no ingenuity, and most damningly, no relevance to 2021.

It begins with, yes, a deadly trap. After chasing a robber into the subway system, a cop is strung up by his tongue, forced to choose to rip it out or be splattered by the oncoming train. His demise brings detectives Zeke Banks (Chris Rock) and William Schenk (Max Minghella), newly assigned partners, to the scene, and they discover almost immediately that it's the work of a Jigsaw copycat. The killer is smart -- despite his robed and hooded pig costume that tempts me with the moniker "Pigsaw" -- and apparently seeks to torment Banks with his history of internal affairs problems at the precinct. The killer picks out corrupt cops one by one, pretending to teach them lessons by "playing a game" with them, as we know full well. Few survive, and all suffer.

As goes with this franchise, we are trained to suspect the unexpected (which is to say, expected) suspects. Could it be the captain (Marisol Nichols), whose badass role as the only female in command might have murderous underpinnings? Could it be the new partner, who clearly feels the tension with his new, unwilling partner? Could it be Banks's father Marcus (Samuel L. Jackson), who gets pulled into the fevered hunt? Or could it be Banks himself, who grows increasingly eccentric as the case spirals inward? Whoever it is, Banks needs to work quickly, especially after his partner is skinned alive and his father goes missing. The problem for me is that nothing about these characters is very compelling. They're all only so much meat, ultimately, and the film treats them as such before they get sucked into the inevitable meat grinder.

Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, even the film's signature traps -- torture devices intended to symbolically and literally reshape their victims -- aren't that interesting. Not that I really liked the gore-porn tendencies of this series (besides the first film), but at least some of the installments embraced the absurdity of horror its creators imagined. Here, we have fairly generic traps that, while effective in making viewers cringe, feel more nihilistic in their determination to kill rather than teach. Then again, in some ways, I felt more invested in this movie because the traps weren't, writ large, a Grand Guignol splatterfest; they were more grounded and realistic, so I wasn't consistently taken out of the moment.

Mostly, I am disappointed because of what the film could have been, based on the marketing and casting. The film flirts with raising really interesting questions about police corruption and brutality, about people of color in policing roles, about the brutality of social pressures on law enforcement and the cruel extremes to which cops can fall. But the movie never invests any time -- or even intelligent conversation -- to any of these ideas. Every time I wondered if the thematic stakes would drive home, we're jolted into another laughably strange flashback with Jackson and his team, cheated out of yet another hope for timeliness. Even Rock, who is talented at bridging the gap between humor and horror here, can't save his scenes, though he tries desperately to dig his heels in as a world-weary detective on the edge of propriety. It's worth a watch, but not much more than that.