#jigsaw is also not a great movie but it’s more entertaining than this shit

[soullessjack]

what saw movie do you dislike and why?

Spiral (2021).

There’s movies that are so bad they’re good, and then there’s movies that are so bad you feel like you’ve lost years of your life during its runtime. Spiral is the latter.

// obligatory spoiler warning, but genuinely it’s not worth watching //

Firstly, there’s a jarring shift in aesthetic and tone between this and the first 6 Saw movies. It’s hard to explain with words alone, but the other movies all have this claustrophobic atmosphere to them. Between the traps and other environments, everything is typically dark and dim and cluttered and confusing (John’s warehouse lair, the various traps, Adam’s shithole apartment, Tapp’s office, etc). More brightly lit and clean environments like Gordon’s home and hospital are distinctly cold and empty, and the various shots of the outside world are largely kept in such small tight frame that you still feel confined.

As such, the characters themselves feel suffocated by their own environments too, even if it’s just within their everyday lives. Tapp is suffocated by his obsession, Adam is suffocated by his seedy job, and even though Gordon’s environments are fairly large and bright and spacious, they lack any warmth or welcome; both home and hospital are sterile. This constant sense of confinement is what I think lends immensely to Saw’s unique flavor of horror.

Spiral doesn’t have any of that. It focuses on a big-city police department, full of wide open spaces and warm colors. There are plenty of environments that could’ve been used for the claustrophobic feeling, like the police department or the opening kill train station—but then, the department is large enough to fit 20+ officers at a time, and the train station is fucking huge. There’s also a lot of traveling around with the main character, Zeke, as he investigates the latest Sawpycat, so you never get the same suffocation or confinement feelings as before. But now let me get to Zeke.

He’s a cop in the department that’s currently being targeted by Sawpycat, and his backstory is that a few years ago he saw another “brother” shoot a witness who wanted to testify against another cop, and when he tried to confront the corruption, the department turned against him (we’ll get to the police corruption part later, but holy shit is that possibly the worst part of the whole movie). It’s not very important, but Zeke is also played by Chris Rock—as in, Marty the Zebra from Madagascar Chris Rock. I’m sure he’s a talented guy, but he does not have the range, and I don’t know if it’s just because of his voice or that he isn’t usually a horror actor, but he just cannot land the role. This being the opening dialogue for his character doesn’t help either:

This is another example of the tonal shift being completely thrown off, and it being said by Marty the Zebra isn’t exactly an improvement. One of Adam’s lines in Saw 2004 is literally “I wouldn’t care if you covered yourself in peanut butter and had a 15-hooker gang bang,” and that alone tells me more about his character and dynamic with Gordon than whatever this is supposed to. That’s cinematic poetry to me. But the dialogue throughout this whole movie is so..empty. So devoid of substance. It definitely registers as words on a paper being read aloud, but not as genuine thoughts or feelings from the characters. Not only are wokeness jokes completely unfunny, they’re also completely out of place for a Saw movie.

Now, I will say that Saw is a franchise that focuses on various social-political issues before; police corruption & brutality, drug addiction, poverty, the justice system, prison conditions, the healthcare system, etc are all elements that tie directly into its’ main story and lend to the uniqueness even more. I mean, for all intents and purposes Jigsaw and his apprentices are technically vigilantes working outside the law. Spiral itself focuses on police brutality and corruption and goes all-in with it through Zeke’s story and the serial targeting of various precinct officers (I kind of liked the tie-in to cops as pigs and Jigsaw’s pig symbolism but that’s about it).

See, as odd as it may sound, the point of Jigsaw’s games and the qualifications of his targets is redemption. It’s intended to be a second chance for people who don’t value life, be it theirs or others. Eric Matthews from Saw 2 is a crooked cop who framed and sentenced Amanda Young and other people for false drug charges. But he’s also a father struggling through a divorce who wants to be there for his son, Daniel, and will do anything to save or help him. You can and should hate him for falsely ruining numerous peoples’ lives, but you can still sympathize with the pain and fear he feels for his son.

There’s nuance to him, as there’s nuance to the other various victims throughout the movies, and that nuance allows you to care for the fact that these people are victims at all, because the driving point that makes you root for the victims’ survival and care about their situation is that they ultimately deserve to live and redeem themselves despite their wrongdoings. With Spiral’s victims, there’s no nuance whatsoever. Every targeted cop is targeted for past corruption that went unpunished, and every one of them deserves what they get, full stop. One of the cops literally shot a teenager to death for flipping him off (and he has what’s probably my favorite kill of the whole movie). What makes it even worse is that the Sawpycat killer is a fucking victim of police brutality. Remember Zeke’s origin story as a witness to another cop murdering a man to protect his crooked buddy? Yeah, the killer is that man’s son, having witnessed his father’s death and vowing revenge on the whole system by destroying it from the inside out, and he wants Zeke to be his boy best friend taking down more evil cops together and yada yada.

Shockingly, he gets away with it in the end instead of dying like you’d expect for an anti-cop vigilante, but even still the entire story just feels so poorly executed and contrived. I don’t feel any of the stress or emotional weight of these peoples’ deaths because they wholeheartedly deserve it. I don’t even sympathize with Zeke as “one of the good cops” because 1) his personality is bland, and 2) there’s a scene where he goes undercover to a drug dealer’s for information and proceeds to not only break this man’s legs till the bone sticks out, but then makes a long winded joke about posting it “for the Gram” and pouring whiskey on it. The end credits song is also a rap song that still feels so unfitting for the tone of the franchise (at least, compared to the other movies’ ending with primarily metal songs. I guess it’s a product of time deal).

So, yeah. Spiral is undoubtedly the worst Saw movie, and honestly I can’t even call it a Saw movie because of how far removed from the franchise it feels.

I will say, tho, that I do not blame Chris Rock and Samuel L Jackson (yes, he’s here too as Zeke’s dad; it’s more believable casting than Chris but still not great) for their movie failing as it did. They’re both incredibly talented actors, and horror movies (and movies in general) with black leads are very lacking in Hollywood, but I truly think this movie was doomed to begin with. and whether that’s poor writing or Hollywood dooming a black-lead narrative as usual I can’t say. They did their best with what they were given, and considering how little that was, they have all my respect.