"Spiral: From The Book of SAW": Review - A Reboot With Growing Pains

A chance encounter at a wedding led Chris Rock to a producer from Lionsgate, where he expressed some interest in a continuation of the nearly two-decade-old series. What originally began as an independently-funded horror film, has now spawned seven sequels, one spin-off film, two video games, a comic book series, and an in-development TV show. There’s also an amusement park ride too.

But in 2010, when the world of Saw seemed to be coming to a close with what was presumably its last installment, “Saw: The Final Chapter,” the gruesome series followed in the footsteps of its hockey mask-wielding pier. And as the case with “Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter;” the gruesome killings had just begun. With the series first attempt at a reboot, “Jigsaw,” earning over $100 million at the box office, it’s no surprise that Lionsgate wished to ensure their first-ever cash cow kept coming.

While fans have flocked to these films hoping to have their expectations catered to, the script, co-written by “Jigsaw” duo Josh Stolberg and Peter Goldfinger, seems to want to inject this series with some much-needed variety as “Spiral” has equal parts social commentary as it does carnage.

The story goes like this, veteran homicide detective, Zeke Banks (Chris Rock), has been accosted by his precinct for turning in a fellow officer for murdering an unarmed witness in cold blood. Since then, he has been your typical lone-wolf detective who doesn’t play by the rules. After his cover is blown in an attempted sting operation, Banks is assigned to a different case with his fresh-faced new partner, Det. William Schneck (Max Minghella). A mutilated body has been found dismembered in a subway tunnel. The fate of this John Doe serves as the opening as we see suspected dirty cop, Det. Marv Boswick is caught in a grizzly trap in which he must remove himself from his own deceptive tongue as a train barrels towards him.

The sequence is one of the many in “Spiral” in which a dirty cop is caught in the franchise’s infamous un-winnable scenarios where a new puppet mascot, this time a pig dressed in a police uniform, reminds the victims of their transgressions which led them to these deadly games. Given the context of star and executive producer Chris Rock’s statements on killer cops in his stand-up, “Spiral” is an obvious indictment of those “bad apples” who make their way into precincts across the nation.

Despite the well-meaning intentions of offering a Saw film that features the patented bloody traps the franchise is known for while also giving fans enough social commentary to sink their teeth into, “Spiral” ends up not saying much at all as the film begins to unravel at the seams throughout its runtime.

The ideology, though admirable for its attempt at relevance, seems to miss the point. Instead of examining the very core of the idiom, “one bad apple can spoil the barrel,” “Spiral” does more to serve the narrative that bad apples are just that; isolated incidents that need to be brought to justice or “thrown out”. The justice this film dishes out to the officers is as grizzly as its predecessors, which only serves to further murky the film’s motifs.

Rock, after his star turn in “Fargo” Season 4, gives a failed, but earnest attempt at playing the constantly squinted, hard-nosed detective. With him and his idealistic partner on the case, the film aims to emulate to grimy world of David Fincher’s “Se7en.” But as in almost all other areas, “Spiral” falls short at capturing that film’s level of intrigue and suspense, and instead, it displays just a bit more effort than has been seen from this franchise in over 15 years, which, admittedly, is a pretty low bar to clear.