Spiral: Saw
While it's commendable to harken back to the series' roots, not even Chris Rock can save such a jarring, worthless sequel.
The Saw franchise is one of the few long-running, horror franchises that I have seen every single entry. I remember being just young enough to be affected by a cable viewing of the original film although it didn’t hinder my interest in the series as I grew older. I went from a scared kid to a semi-fan of a series that seemed to love jumping the shark with almost every new entry, going from loving the accomplice of Jigsaw twist in Saw 2 to laughing out loud every time another character would profess that they ALSO were an accomplice to the infamous killer. After seven films (and around five accomplices to Jigsaw being revealed), the series ended with 2010’s Saw: The Final Chapter…only for the series to come back seven years later with the unintentionally funny Jigsaw. With the eighth chapter ending with yet ANOTHER accomplice to Jigsaw being revealed, it seemed plain as day that the series wasn’t very sure on where to go next.
It was then that the franchise’s savior came out of nowhere: Chris Rock. With a strange affinity for the franchise, Rock was given the reins to take a crack at a series that has been torture porn practically since its first sequel. Samuel L. Jackson even joined the project, making it quite possibly the most star power the series has ever had in one film. A year after its initial release date, the ninth film in the Saw franchise has taken shape as Spiral. With an attempt to return the series back to its roots, Spiral sets out to be a film that both fans and newcomers can jump into with no hesitation.
Spiral follows Detective Zeke Banks (Chris Rock), a lone wolf in his department that is tasked with showing a new rookie (Max Minghella) the ropes of the department. While investigating what they believed to be is a dead homeless man, a package sent to Zeke makes it clear that the man was in fact a close friend of Zeke’s as well as a crooked cop. It’s also revealed that the killer is a Jigsaw copycat, tasking themselves to place crooked cops in sadistic machines that would’ve made John Kramer blush. With a fiery determination to catch the copycat, Zeke is determined to catch the copycat before any more cops end up in the killer’s grasp. With his father Marcus (Samuel L. Jackson), the ex-police commissioner, even looking into the case, Zeke must race to find the killer before he becomes a victim himself.
Right off the bat, Spiral feels like an attempt to bring the series back to its origins rather than focusing mainly on its gruesome traps, even going so far as to hiring the director of the “best” Saw sequels in hopes of returning to a time where the plot still had some pull. Sadly though, with the writers of Jigsaw at the helm, the film ultimately becomes a middling sequel (relative to the franchise) that is certainly less cheesy but is nowhere near good enough to pretend that it’s as interesting as the original. The story the film creates could be interesting if the victims of the Jigsaw copycat weren’t so cartoonishly bad. It’s hard to feel any tension when the corrupt cops are just the absolute worst, clashing harshly with Rock’s attempt to play a detective desperately trying to save his coworkers. It also doesn’t help that the franchise’s titular twists are so overplayed to the point where the audience could guess the killer’s identity in probably the first fifteen minutes.
While the story is at a Jigsaw level, the performances by the film’s two biggest stars aren’t really any better. Chris Rock’s performance is wildly inconsistent while Samuel L. Jackson’s performance feels a few steps above phoning it in. At the beginning, Rock just feels like he’s playing his comedic persona, cracking jokes to the point where it’s even breaking the immersion the film is attempting to paint for itself. However, as the stakes get higher, Rock completely changes his approach to the character, forcing the stress and paranoia that Zeke is feeling to the point of comically overacting at times. As for Jackson, his role isn’t huge so his presence, even if it is just Jackson being Jackson, feels weirdly too good for the film. Hilariously enough, it almost caught me off-guard every time he showed up.
Despite the performances from the stars of the film, every Saw fan has a question in the back of their head when a new film is released: how are the traps? The series has truly had some quality shifts in their iconic weapon of choice, ranging from ingenious to downright awful. Thankfully, the traps in Spiral are probably the best part of the film. The sequences are still extensively graphic but in comparison to some of the other sequels, the traps are reserved and cheeky enough that they feel like the right amount of entertaining, especially for a series that has nine films. While I do feel that the traps are a bit too fast paced at times, they were a diamond in the rough when compared to everything else the film had to offer.
Overall, Spiral is a Saw sequel. There’s nothing special about it. While the traps are fun, they’re nowhere near enough to sit through a jarring film that probably should have come out in the early 2010’s when Saw was practically dead with no signs of resuscitation. Spiral is the equivalent of putting Jerry Seinfeld in a Paranormal Activity sequel and expecting the star power alone to be enough to make the film good. It’s not even the funniest Saw sequel so what it offers in entertainment value and franchise longevity ultimately amounts to very little. In the end, while it’s not the worst of the series, Spiral is a horror film that can only be truly loved by a die hard Saw fan who will take anything that gets thrown their way.