Spiral

The Saw pictures were never really a franchise. They were a television series with a year-long gap between episodes. To compensate, they ended each installment with a revelation designed to bring you back. That worked for seven entries. The trouble with serials is that they accumulate. By part four, you had to have seen parts one, two, and three. This gave them a loyal audience but no way to grow it.

Then came a seven-year silence, and then Jigsaw in 2017, which nobody much attended. I imagine a meeting was held and continuity was blamed. Thus we have Spiral, which carries the subtitle From the Book of Saw, a phrase meaning: same universe, no homework required. I applaud the idea. The execution is another matter.

Chris Rock plays Detective Zeke Banks, who years ago turned in a crooked partner and has been looking over his shoulder ever since. His father, a revered retired chief, is played by Samuel L. Jackson, who arrives with the authority of a man whose career seems impervious to bad movies. A body turns up under a subway train. Soon Zeke has a copycat on his hands, one who collects dirty cops.

That is a workable premise, but it is not really a Saw premise. The original John Kramer was a moralist and a bore about it, forever explaining that he had never murdered anyone, that he only presented an opportunity. His contraptions had exits, on the theory that suffering was a teaching instrument and that a man who chewed through his own restraints would emerge grateful, reformed, alive. You could argue with the theology, but there was theology.

The killer in Spiral has no theology, only a list. The victims must choose: a tongue or an oncoming train, fingers or a live wire, a spine or the next breath. Nobody walks away. What we have is a murderer who insists on custom machinery when the welding torch and pliers used to build it would have been enough.

The effects are good. The tongue and the fingers are hard to watch, and I say that as a compliment.

Then there is Rock. He opens well, with a monologue about “Forrest Gump” and another about cheating spouses, which play less like dialogue than like material; I would bet the house he wrote them. But soon the picture requires him to grieve, and rage, and stare into a middle distance, and director Darren Lynn Bousman keeps moving the camera closer while he tries. You can see the trying. Comedians have surprised us in this line of work before, but Rock belongs in the partner’s role, the funny one who dies at the end of the second act and leaves a hole in the movie. Instead he is the hole.

The screenplay does not help. A superior tells Rock he is too close to this case. He and another officer stand nose to nose shouting “No, fuck you” at each other, which is dialogue the way a car alarm is music. We have been told these men have history. We have not been shown any, so the argument has the emotional charge of two strangers in another county disputing a property line. Everyone in this precinct has a cell phone and nobody answers it or calls for backup, because otherwise there would be no third act.

Every cop here is corrupt except our hero, and the corruption is not the operatic kind. One officer shoots a witness. Another shoots a motorist at a traffic stop for insulting him. These scenes are quiet and horribly plausible, and the film knows it.

Yet in one trap, a black man is puppeteered on steel cables into raising a gun at a SWAT team, which does what SWAT teams do. A movie pushing that button should have a position, but Spiral declines to have one. It ends abruptly, having arranged matters so that the hero is himself a cop and the audience may leave believing whatever it walked in believing. If you are going to take that swing, take it. Otherwise put down the bat.

Still, it is not the worst of these. That remains Jigsaw, for which continuity was never the problem, just characters I wanted dead for reasons unrelated to the plot. I admired this entry’s willingness to try a police procedural, which is closer to where the first one lived, and though I never believed Rock in the part, he never irritated me either. Nobody will love this movie, but fans of the series could do worse, and have.