"This shit's gonna go sideways fast."
And it does. At the end of 2021 when us film nerds are compiling our best and worst of lists for the year, Spiral will comfortably fit into one of them. Can you guess which?
When word filtered through that the long running Saw franchise was being resurrected the moans were legion. What more could it add to an already played out story? Surely it's time was passed? It should have ended after part 3 anyway? Then rumours about it's cast and director started to leak out. Darren Lynn Bousman, the man who helmed the early and best entries of the series was back. An encouraging sign maybe? People started to be intrigued as the whispers got stranger, especially the one about comedian Chris Rock being the driving force behind the series resurrection. Whispers became truth and that truth gathered momentum when none other than Nick Fury himself, Samuel L. Jackson was added to the cast. A veteran horror director behind the camera and two hugely famous actors in front of it? What could go wrong?
Loads apparently.
Detective Marv Boswick is in a bit of a quandry. He's in a subway tunnel with his tongue clamped in a vice and train careening at him. The only way to escape is to rip his own tongue out. He has seconds to decide his fate. Things get messy. Investigating the case is Detective Zeke Banks (Chris Rock, dreadful) and his rookie partner Schenk (Max Mingella). Banks is a pariah in the department, having snitched on a fellow cop years before and since then he's a lone wolf, happy to do his own thing and being saddled with a baby cop ain't his style. When another boy in blue turns up butchered he realises someone is going after cops with dodgy pasts and so our heroes set out to bring the killer to justice. Justice is a tricky thing in a post Jigsaw world though.
Spiral is bad. Not bad in the sense that you could still have a good time with it, maybe laugh along at the shoddiness with a few beers. No it's just flat out bad. It's dull. It's boring. It's 93 minutes long and feels twice that. It wants to do new things but never commits to that want. It falls back on torture porn tropes and camerawork that felt stilted and dated in 2006. It's an uncomfortable blend of drawn out gore and painfully generic cop thriller that never once gels. The cop side of things feels so cliched you'll be wondering is it some kind of Naked Gun type spoof of police procedurals with angry bosses barking profanity, rogue cops doing their own thing and everyone spouting dialogue (the first line of the review is just one of many eyerollers) that Dick Wolf would look down his nose at. It wants to be edgy and topical with it's themes of cop corruption but gives us a lead character who makes the bad guy's plans seem reasonable. It's just a mess. Tonally and otherwise.
If you liked the more visceral aspects of the Saw films you'll probably get something from this. All the suffering, screaming, ripped tendons, torn flesh, entrails and melted faces we've come to expect in a Saw film are present and correct and once again they'll turn your stomach. But for horror films to really work you've got to care about the victims and here you won't give a damn about any of them. Not the faceless masses who make up the bulk of the bodycount or the bigger names later. Chris Rock is especially putrid in his part. The fella can emote, we've seen it before, but here you'll cringe at his hard man act and wonder why the film makers felt the need to make the leading character so flat out unpleasant. A cop who rails against corruption but who has no issues with torturing a suspect for information. Mixed messages abound. As for SLJ? Well he's just wasted, getting maybe 5 minutes screentime and rocking a moustache in a flashback that's so bad it will lift you right out of the movie. This is definitely one he's done for the money.
Spiral is in cinemas now. Saw fans might get a kick out of it but no one else will. To it's credit it's mostly cut ties with the older films but apart from that it's muck. If it's the start of a new franchise you can count me out.
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