Spiral: From the Book of Saw | Film Review

 

'Saw' is one of my absolute favourite movie franchises, so I was really excited to see this new take on it. 

Detective Zeke Banks (Chris Rock) and his partner Detective William Schenk (Max Minghella) are the lead investigators on a series of murders reminiscent of Jigsaw's games. But is there more to the case than meets the eye?

I really wanted to love this movie, but I was left really disappointed.

I loved the opening scene. It stays true to what we love about the Saw movies, which tend to use the opening scenes to show you exactly what's to come from the rest of the movie. This opening scene is one of the best things about the film.

Zeke, the detective, is given a lot of backstory. It's not unusual for a Saw movie to focus on the detective investigating the crimes, but in this film it felt too much. I was way more interested in the murders and victims than the fact that the detective was divorced, or living in the shadow of his father. I didn't care that much about him.

Another thing that I didn't love about the film while watching it was the actual Saw traps. In the Saw films it is known that the traps are designed to give the victims a choice based on why they were chosen. And in the films where the characters could not make a choice, the reason for this was important to the plot. While the traps in this film are also loosely used to advance the plot, it doesn't work as well as it has previously.

The traps are also a lot more gruesome than in the other Saw movies, which made me think that the people involved were more focused on gore than on actually making this a solid Saw movie.

My fundamental problem with this film is that, it is not a Saw film. If it had been called 'Spiral', and had taken out the one or two mentions of Jigsaw, this would have been a fine thriller. But as a Saw film, it fails, because there is nothing about it that links it to the series.

There are a lot of interesting layers to the story, and I was entertained by it, but it wasn't what I thought it would be, and it wasn't what I was excited to see.

The entirety of the film feels like it was made in a rush and not properly thought-out. One of the reasons for this was the inevitable plot-twist, which was one of the most obvious twists I've ever seen in a movie. It felt so obvious that I thought it was a red herring, or that there would be some other twist at the very end, and there just wasn't. It actually weakened the plot of the rest of the film.

Overall, this was an okay, entertaining movie, but it wasn't a Saw movie and shouldn't have been advertised as one. It set up a lot of expectations that then weren't met, and ended up being really disappointing, particularly as a huge fan of the Saw franchise. 

4/10