Even by the obsessively self-referential standards of slasher film franchises, the “Saw” franchise is torturously insular. The first eight films were obsessed with their own tragic backstories (and retconning scenes from earlier movies), resulting in a labyrinth of tedious minutia from which there was ironically no escape — except to stop watching. (Which, given the lackluster box office of 2017’s “Jigsaw”, many people did.)
The new film, “Spiral: From the Book of Saw” — the ninth in the series and out in theaters Friday — breaks out of all those fiendishly tiresome traps: The original Jigsaw, John Kramer (Tobin Bell), has his legacy firmly set aside and you really don’t need to have seen any of the other “Saw” movies before watching this one.
Moreover, “Spiral” has an actual high concept: Where Kramer’s Jigsaw generally concentrated on trapping and murdering individual sinners — murderers, liars, negligent nurses — “Spiral” is specifically about the evils of corrupt policing. The decision to focus on structural evils rather than personal ones is both refreshing and admirable but also shows how Hollywood is tied (with rusted chains) to the same mechanisms of death and violence the movie seeks to saw apart.
The police force is integrated, but the criticism of police is whitewashed.
The protagonist of the film is Detective Zeke Banks (Chris Rock), the son of former department head Marcus Banks (Samuel L. Jackson). Zeke and his new partner, William Schenk (Max Minghella), are investigating a Jigsaw-copycat killer. Like his predecessor, the new murderer creates elaborate death traps, which require victims to mutilate themselves to escape.
Unlike the original Jigsaw, though, the new one has trained his ire specifically on corrupt cops.
The movie’s criticism of the corruption of the criminal justice system is timely and, like Jigsaw’s victims, well executed. But it omits an important piece: “Spiral” carefully dances around the racism endemic to that corruption.
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The movie does nod to the importance of racism in policing by casting a Black man as its lead. But as Northwestern University professor Steven Thrasher has pointed out, the figure of the Black police officer in media like “Brooklyn 99” or “Watchmen” is often a form of disavowal: Black cops create a veneer of deniability of racism in the system. Their presence implicitly claims, as Thrasher says, that “not all cops” are racist, and that a system which hires some Black people is at least provisionally redeemable.
The communities the police target are not racially marked, and Jigsaw himself never punishes any cop for racist violence.
The movie is obviously informed by Black Lives Matter's analysis of police violence, but it then removes Black lives from the center of that analysis, even as it puts Black police at the center of the plot. The police force is integrated, but the criticism of police is whitewashed. It’s seemingly OK to say that the police can be murderers, even on a systemic level, but to call them systemically racist is apparently still a step too far for Hollywood.
In “Spiral,” then, the Black police officers are part of a post-racial vision of corrupt policing: Police brutality in the world of “Spiral” is rampant and police violence is endemic. But the communities the police target are not racially marked, and Jigsaw himself never punishes any cop for racist violence.
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Still, the new Jigsaw’s clearer focus on corrupt cops is a welcome departure for a franchise that has always had trouble with narrative drive. Even the original 2004 “Saw” kept getting distracted and wandering away from its locked room central scene and, as the franchise went on, the plots tied themselves in ever more self-aggrandizing knots of smug cleverness.
In the end, “Spiral” indicts the “Saw“ series itself as a fantasy of policing.
“Spiral” straightens the story out. Most of the film only allows audiences to experience things from Zeke’s point of view as he pursues the answer to the whodunit. He’s sympathetic and charismatic, and you actually care what happens to him — which is not something you could say for most of franchise’s characters.
[Mild spoilers follow.]
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The first murder involves a detective who lied on the stand and, of course, a device that tears out tongues. Zeke’s investment in the case is complicated by the fact that he turned in his previous partner for shooting a witness to police brutality; his commitment to justice has made him a pariah in the department ever since.
The movie’s criticism of the corruption of the criminal justice system is timely and, like Jigsaw’s victims, well executed.
The movie is structured as a police procedural, so viewers are initially on the side of the cops. But as the hour and a half runtime ticks by, every sympathetic office is shown to be a murderer, a thief and/or an abusive jerk. (Yes, even that one. Yep, that one too.) In a department this deep in cruelty and coverups, the cosmetic reforms we often hear touted by politicians — more training, more body cameras — obviously aren’t going to cut it.
So instead, Jigsaw resorts to actual cutting.
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Blue Lives Matter supporters might wishfully see this as some sort of commentary on the toll of the so-called defund the police initiatives. But since every trap in the movie is a punishment for a concrete crime, the (sharp-pointed) thrust seems more designed to skewer the criminal justice system itself. Like law enforcement, Jigsaw uses promises of rehabilitation as an excuse for, and even as a form of, monstrous torture. In the end, “Spiral” indicts the “Saw“ series itself as a fantasy of policing.
The surprise reveal/reversal at the end isn’t exactly unexpected — but it’s well executed, and (again unlike the zigs and zags of most of the entries in the franchise) feels well earned
“Spiral” is easily the best film in the Saw franchise, and yet its failure to really go for the racist jugular of policing is a betrayal of its own uncompromisingly bloody aesthetic. Murdering an individual is easy; decapitating a system, it turns out, is a lot trickier. Jigsaw can plan out every eventuality and tighten every clamp. But if the spiral is injustice, he’s as bound to it as his victims.