Saw it all before
At least ‘Spiral’ provided actors a paycheck
There seems to be a limit on how many ways you show a psycho killer tearing apart of a human body without tedium setting in. After a seemingly endless series of sequels to “Saw,” there has to be more to cinema than severed body parts.
With the first movie, director James Wan accompanied the gore with some good old fashioned tension and a feeling of crushing claustrophobia. Darren Lynn Bousman, who has made his bones, um literally, with the sequels makes little effort to add anything interesting to the gore.
Bousman has toyed with making musicals and other off-center offerings, but here, he and screenwriters Josh Stolberg and Pete Goldfinger seem content to dig up the same corpses.
Casting Chris Rock as Detective Zeke Banks at least promises some comic delights. Sadly, Bousman treats the silly, simplistic storyline as if it were scripture. Rock showed dramatic chops in “New Jack City” and the most recent season of “Fargo,” but here, he and the rest of the cast deliver their lines as if each line in the script were written in all caps. Even two-way conversations occur as if the performers were yelling across tunnels instead of facing each other.
What there is of a plot concerns a serial killer who targets crooked cops. The killer, who recalls how the late Jigsaw operated, can’t merely kill his victims. Each of their deaths involves whatever offense incurred his wrath. A liar must choose if he wishes to live without his tongue.
After a while Bousman and company run out of interesting ways to make dirty police officers suffer. A more imaginative film could be made by simply capturing employees at a slaughterhouse going through their shifts.
The conceit with “Spiral” is similar to David Fincher’s “Se7en,” but Fincher and screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker occasionally created sympathetic characters. Viewers cared whose head wound up in a box.
There’s no danger of that hap
pening in “Spiral.”
Both the guilty and the innocent are glum, profanity-spewing dullards. It takes a special incompetence to make Samuel L. Jackson’s journeys into cussing seem uneventful. Where are those snakes on a plane when they are needed most?
Rock’s Zeke is upright, but morose. The comic slips in a few cynical quips, but much of what passes for humor in “Spiral” comes from seemingly earnest condemnations of Zeke’s dirty peers.
When Fincher examines the toll crime takes on criminals and the people who struggle to bring them to justice, he raises intriguing questions in the process and can deliver stories that are as involving as they are dark. His tales also feature stylish visuals to accompany his characters behaving badly. Bousman shows a contemporary precinct building with ancient GE fans our grandparents might have used, but his imagination stops there.
This time the killer wears a pig mask which is neither inventive nor terribly scary. Couldn’t there be a more subtle way of expressing discontent with law enforcement?
This killer’s “games” sound like dispatches from the hacker collective Anonymous but without the catchy slogans or sense of purpose.
As a fan of George A. Romero and John Carpenter, I love a grisly image or two, but nothing in “Spiral” is more interesting than the closing credits that follow it. It’s nice to know that several people at least got paid to slog through this irredeemable bloodbath.