Spiral: From the Book of Saw (2021)

directed by Darren Lynn Bousman

Canada, USA

93 minutes

2 stars out of 5

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I knew going in that this wouldn't be good because of how universally ridiculed it is, but on a personal level, every time I watch anything directed by Darren Lynn Bousman I dislike it more than the last one. I decided to see Spiral (from the safety of my own home- I'm not risking getting covid for this) mostly just for laughs, but instead what I got was a movie that meanders around unsatisfyingly until it ends, also unsatisfyingly, and never even made me feel enough emotion to be amused by it.

So I think that the reason why the Saw movies have started to be less and less tolerated by the general public lately is for much the same reason as Todd Phillips' "Joker" was so strongly derided: These movies are so in love with their own philosophy, and so intent on shoving it in the audience's face like it's the most intelligent thing in the world, and that philosophy is at or below the level of a teenage boy's angsty journal rants. I'm not going to harp too much on what the "true meaning" of Saw is, because Spiral is an entirely new chapter in the series with a new killer and is really a Saw movie in name only, but it seemed like in the first couple of films John Kramer was trapping people for one of two reasons: Because they personally wronged him, or because he saw them as blindly mooching their way through life with no regard for those around them, and he took such offense to this that he wanted them to die, I guess. The whole "sheeple" theme has always been really strong throughout this whole series as a motive for why the folks who end up stuck in traps do end up there.

But the horror of a Saw scenario, to me, should come from the feeling that anybody might end up targeted by the killer because he's just so warped that the smallest mistake is cause for him to see you as worthless. The horror is in the idea that if, for example, you cut somebody off in traffic and then they go on to crash their car and their whole family dies, you're automatically on the hook for that. Spiral totally divorces itself from this idea by making everybody who ends up in a trap 100% a bad person. This is a Big Cop Movie™ and all the people who get killed for their transgressions are exaggeratedly crooked cops who do stuff like shoot people for flipping them off and cover up corruption (again, by shooting people). The audience's hand is held and bad cops are pointed out with as much subtlety as showing a child an elephant at a zoo. Again, I'm not gonna act like it's a heinous sin to make everything so cut-and-dry good vs. bad, because this movie clearly thinks it's separate from every other previous one and doesn't hold to the same standards, but the huge difference in motive behind the Saw killings is something that, if you had any ounce of respect for or interest in the series before, will make you hate this one.

Is the whole problem of this movie the fact that the Jigsaw franchise has, by now, been viciously milked dry and anything new coming out will inevitably be as horrible or worse than Spiral? I think it just might be. It feels like there was an attempt to make this feel "current" by having it focus on crooked cops and police violence, but if you're going to go about that plot by making the main character one of the "good" cops who tries to clean up the department from within, you're missing the entire point. But examining systemic racism and inherent bias doesn't fill theater seats. Samuel L. Jackson saying "motherfucker" does.

There's really just nothing about this movie that feels watchable. I can't imagine paying money to go and see this because it feels so thoroughly like something that's been on Redbox for six months already. I guess it's somewhat praiseworthy that despite the differences in character backstories and characters in general, this fits in with the rest of the series in terms of aesthetics and mood, but there's not much to like about that. Towards the end, Chris Rock's main character finds himself in a simple trap that's much the same as in the very first film. He wakes up handcuffed to a pipe by the wrist with a flimsy saw next to him- not strong enough to cut through the cuffs, but strong enough to cut through flesh, if need be. He seems to intuitively know what he needs to do, but instead of making that choice, or really even considering it, he finds a bobby pin on the ground and springs the cuffs. I don't know what Bousman's reason behind putting that in the film was, but the translation of something that was, when it first came out, genuinely upsetting into something so weak and defanged with an obvious solution feels like a metaphor for the direction this series has gone in.