In many ways, im glad I've seen 'Spiral' at this point in my life, as having now seen it, i'll be able to write this Letterboxd review, store it away and then NEVER watch it again. This review acting as a reminder to myself whenever I get morbidly curious to not even BEGIN to consider hitting play on this.
So 'Jigsaw' got panned by critics in 2017 for its attempt to soft reboot the franchise (which...I still dont entirely understand, it's basically all the best bits of 'Saw 2-7' mashed together into one self contained feature rather than watered down and spread out over 6 movies...unoriginal? definitely. bad? absolutely not.)
So, the soft reboot plans got shelved and 4 years later, we have 'Spiral' another stab at soft rebooting the series and a film that takes place in the 'Saw' universe, but approaches the usual formulaic approach differently.
Set in the modern day of 2021 'Spiral' picks up with members of a local police department slowly dissapearing and winding up dead by circumstances eerily similar to the 'Jigsaw' killings almost 20 years prior. It turns out that 'Jigsaw' is back on the scene (now wearing a pig mask exclusively...little to no Billy this time) and is picking off corrupt cops with the aim of trying to 'purify' the law enforcement.
Chris Rock plays Detective Zeke Banks, a morally questionable cop who's managed to coast in the force for years because his father (played by Samuel L Jackson) was the chief inspector of the force.
When an incident happens that puts Banks in the firing line for incompitency, he's buddied up with a partner, but the pair seem to have drawn the attention of 'Jigsaw' who now wants to play a game with them...
This films dull. I'll give it credit in as far as it *does* try to do things a little bit differently to the previous entries (the emphisis here is less on the people trying to get out of the traps, and more on the police trying to track down whoever it is who's doing the killings.) But while they do try and shake things up in some areas, there are others where they really dont do enough to break from the usual motions and the results are a ULTRA boring film that feels like more padding than actual story telling.
For a starters, the 'Saw' films are known for starting as psychological horror thrillers that emphisied gore, then later dropped the psychological element as it slowly drifted further and further into the gory slasher subgenre with just a hint of a thriller buried under the surface.
'Spiral' is just a straight cop thriller that occasionally remembers it is a 'Saw' influenced film and randomly drops in some of THE worst traps in the entire franchises run to date. The pacing is slow, lumbering and boing to the point that it becomes hard to remember exactly whats supposed to be happening in this thing, because all the scenes feel the same. Its just 93 minutes of info dumping this new universes lore...lore thats filled with padding meaning you dont really know what information is worth retaining for the 'clever' end twist reveal and what stuff is just aimless chatter used to pad out the runtime.
They tweak the tone slightly here (at least in the first half) to introduce more sarcastic and dry comedy. But this then knocks the film off kilter as the second half ramps up and the slight comedy angle is ditched all together in favour of just going full on into the gritty cop drama angle.
The characters just arnt interesting or engaging. they do bother to give them some history and complexity. But non of the characters feel like they have any degree of uniqueness to them. Only made worse by the dialogue which is literally 90% stereotypical anti hero/dirty cop quotes.
There isnt really any kind of warm up or down here, so the act structuring all kind of homodgonizes together. around the mid point of the movie it does suddenly get a *bit* of a pep, but nowhere near enough to carry this thing to the end credits. they dont really signal act changes. It just feels like one long drudge of a script thats here to read you a lore bible and then hope the sequel lets it actually DO something with it...which...had they stopped to check the quality of the movie they were making, they'd know a sequel was DEFINITELY not on the cards.
The direction is more or less the standard of studio quality. It isnt trying anything new, it feels like a film made by a director who's phoning it in for the money. it has no creative flare or zeal, no heart, no passion behind the lens. its documenting a movie. Not engaging us with a movie.
The cine's also flat, to standard and thats about it, compositions okay, but unremarkable. the edit is pretty dire with long, slow paced sequences broken up with seizure inducing edits and most annoyingly of all, for some reason the block colour correcting style of 'Saws 3-6' is back again and just as annoying as I remembered it being.
The performances are almost all phoned in. This is a film starring Chris Rock and Samuel L Jackson as a father/son cop duo trying to hunt down the Jigsaw killer, it could have been great. But they both look so tired and done with this movie before it even really gets started. its a paycheque for them. A driveway. thats it. The supporting cast are equally as bad, theres the odd glimpse of genuine sincerity in the performances here and there, generally from the folks for whome, this is there biggest break and they want to impress...But its few and far between and broadly speaking, they just get through the script as dryly as possible and hope the next gigs more valuable.
If I was speculating, 'Spiral' to me feels like a movie that only exists to retain an IP license or for some kind of tax reason. I cant in good faith think for a moment that someone looked at the 'Saw' franchise, looked at the script for this and went 'THATS WHAT THE PUBLICS HUNGRY FOR!' I'd honestly believe that someone submitted a Cop drama to the studio and was told the only way it'd get made is if it was a 'Saw' movie.
What we have here is a 93 minute movie that feels about double the length of that, thats totally drab on almost every level. When they made 'Jigsaw' it was a gamble as to whether the tweaks to tone and story would work or not. I dont think the critics of the time knew how lucky they were, because 'Spiral' is what happenes when you try to make a 'Saw' movie that shakes things up a bit and it goes wrong. A poor movie that im glad I never have to watch again.
source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/spiral-from-the-book-of-saw/
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