‘Spiral: From The Book of Saw’ Is a Lopsided Attempt To Go Full ACAB
'Spiral' wears its political ideologies like a human skin-suit, never ready to truly speak its mind, and always backing off, just as it threatens to get interesting.
If there’s a value to the Saw cinematic universe, it’s that the gnarly horror franchise has never attempted to be about anything.
Sure, the films were released into a post-Abu Gharab world, and the general public’s embrace of such vicious depictions of torture makes sense in the heightened, blood-soaked era following 9/11. But, save from the health care satire of Saw V, these political concerns were only ever nebulous — background conditions, rather than the films’ direct focus.
Character backstory, thematic concerns, sub-plots: in the world of Saw, all these common cinematic devices are cast aside in favour of a series of exposition-heavy, downright gruelling set-ups in which briefly sketched meat puppets are put through the grinder, often literally. Saw movies have always been, first and foremost, disgust machines, designed to get the audience to squirm, not to think.
Spiral: From the Book of Saw, the Chris Rock-starring and produced soft reboot of the series, represents a sudden deviation from this formula. Not only is Jigsaw (Tobin Bell), the grand mastermind of the series up to this point, wholly absent, but Spiral has a lot of half-formed theses on its mind. It’s a film born from the era of Black Lives Matter protests, a nail bomb of ideas that wants to take on everything from police corruption to the shooting of unarmed black men.
Gone are the days of Saw III, when the franchise’s biggest concern was how to make death by rotting pigs as disgusting as possible: this is a film that tries to say something about the world in which we live. Emphasis on ‘tries’.
Spiral is a Saw Film that Doesn’t Want to be a Saw Film
Spiral is first and foremost a detective story, following a burned-out cop Zeke (Chris Rock) as he tries to escape the shadow of his overbearing Police Commissioner father (Samuel L. Jackson) and deal with the aftermath of his decision to rat out a corrupt police officer.
In a departure from the scalpel-like precision of previous Saw films, we learn a great deal about Zeke — his desires, his broken marriage, his fraught relationship with his boss. These aren’t fresh narrative devices, of course — Zeke is the epitome of the hard-living, straight-talking cop with the heart of gold — but Spiral‘s interest in the psychological profile of its hero makes it different from what the franchise has attempted before.
Only, very little is achieved with the mountains of Zeke’s backstory. Rock tries admirably in his first real dramatic turn, but there’s an overwhelming sense of pointlessness to the tropes that assemble by his feet. Director Darren Lynn Bousman simply never finds a reason to care about Zeke or his rage, and Spiral‘s rushed flashbacks feel well-worn as soon as they start.
Worse still, particularly for fans of the series, all that plotting leaves very little for the defining feature of Saw films: the traps. There are only four very brief violent set-ups scattered throughout the film, and each of them leans on the same central gambit — corrupt cops having to sacrifice a particularly squishy part of their body in order to ensure their survival. The gore is rushed and uninspired; Bousman seems bored by the very gimmick that made the series famous. When the film returns, confusingly and briefly, to the infamous hacksaw set-up of the first film, it’s played as a disaffected joke.
The result is a film designed for seemingly no-one. Saw fans will be disappointed by the lack of inventiveness, and fans of thrillers will be disappointed by the thin plotting that takes up most of the running time. There’s just no audience for such a half-formed thing.
And then there’s the politics.
Spiral Can’t Swallow What It Has Bitten Off
In place of Jigsaw, Spiral offers up a villain hell-bent on revenge, a mass murderer who (mild spoilers follow) kills off those corrupt officers who have committed crimes on the job. On the face of it then, Spiral takes the systemic violence of policing seriously. Its cast of cop characters are by turns vicious, stupid, and single-minded, cogs in a vast machine of particularly mundane evil. When the final twist drops, it’s one that indicts the entire force itself, revealing previously noble characters to have considerably dirtied hands.
And yet every time Spiral seems ready to lean with full gusto into this welcome criticism of the forces that subjugate minorities, it backs off. A key break in the case occurs thanks to an instance of police torture. There are long spiels about how hard life is for cops; how gruelling. When the villain pulling the strings — literally — reveals their grand plan, it’s not to abolish the department; it’s to reform it. And then there’s Zeke. Zeke is a genuinely good-hearted officer; a mythic force of good. Just as frequently as Spiral leans on suspicion towards the force, it also develops a thesis that could be broadly described as, “not all cops.”
Just as frequently as Spiral leans on suspicion towards the force, it also develops a thesis that could be broadly described as, ‘not all cops.’
The result is a hodge-podge of ideas, none of which Spiral is brave enough to fully commit to. Mass media that criticises the forces of corruption inherent to the current set-up of the police force should be welcomed, but only if such criticisms are genuinely thought-out. And at the end of the day, Spiral wears its political ideologies like a human skin-suit, never ready to truly speak its mind, and always backing off, just as it threatens to get interesting.
If a film wants to say something, it should say something. Otherwise, let’s return to the glory days when this franchise was very, very silly.
Joseph Earp is a staff writer at Junkee. He tweets @JosephOEarp.