Spiral from the book of saw series#
The bitter, wisecracking Zeke is paired up with wide-eyed rookie William Schenk (Max Minghella), and their comic back-and-forth, while predictable, is fun, especially for a series that has so rarely bothered to build characters or offer any sharp dialogue. Now, a new series of Jigsaw-inspired killings is targeting the force, and Zeke has to lead the investigation, even though nobody trusts him and many of the victims hate him. Chris Rock plays the cynical Zeke Banks, a veteran cop whose willingness to expose his corrupt colleagues years earlier earned him the scorn of the entire police department. Spiral, thankfully, has a fairly energetic cast. One thing that really dragged down some of the later Saw movies was that the legacy of the original Jigsaw (played by the great Tobin Bell, whose pale, disaffected demeanor added a whole new dimension of cruelty to the character) had been taken over by some of the least charismatic actors in the world. It does have star power, however, which is refreshing. It resolves to fix this series’ clichés with a different set of clichés.
Spiral: From the Book of Saw, delivers mildly on the torture-porn front, but its tone and focus are decidedly different. If we must have more of them, these movies could use some reinvention, so long as you do due genre diligence and throw in a few gruesome scenes of people desperately trying to escape mechanical scalpers or swinging pendulum blades or human-size ovens or whatnot. In other words, a Saw reboot need not have any particular reverence for the series itself. Thus did one of the more sophisticated and imaginative horror films of the past 20 years wind up inspiring some of the century’s sleazier horror sequels. (Of course, Jigsaw’s victims rarely grew more often than not, they failed their tests and wound up as piles of entrails on shit-smeared warehouse floors.) The first several Saw films mostly stuck to the plan - and the third remains an inspired marvel of lunacy - but eventually it all got too ridiculous and cruel and lost any sense of fun. His was meant to be a kind of self-help sadism, with those sick torture games and old-timey murder contraptions all supposedly serving the noble goal of teaching flawed people the errors of their ways and helping them grow, albeit ironically. As the various follow-ups to James Wan and Leigh Whannell’s bizarre, impossibly tense 2004 original - which, let’s not forget, was a Sundance film - got gorier and sillier, they also eventually lost sight of the idea that had made the Jigsaw Killer’s project so grotesquely compelling in the first place. The Saw series isn’t exactly the most precious of horror franchises. Chris Rock in Spiral: From the Book of Saw.
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