Jigsaw is dead but the Saw franchise continues to spiral, now with Chris Rock! The aptly-named Spiral is a bizarro world creation. One that feels like a Chris Rock-hosted Saturday Night Live Saw satire short that forgot it was a bit and took on life of its own. Frankensteining Chris Rock’s signature observational comedy stylings, the Saw series’ trademark torture gore, frenetic editing, and grizzled low-budg aesthetics, and a lazy attempt to modernize the formula by putting police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement front and center, Spiral is a crazed textual and tonal mishmash. One that thinks it has a lot on its mind but nothing of actual value to say, it’s the weird clunker of a horror reboot that can’t even prove how it ever thought the disparate elements would align to begin with. Instead, we’re left with whatever the hell Spiral: From the Book of Saw is and the layup imagery of a shit of a movie circling the proverbial drain.

The story goes that Rock pitched Lionsgate executive Michael Burns a “fresh” “new” take on the long-expired but still fiscally-viable Saw franchise when they were randomly seated next to one another at a Brazilian wedding. Clearly no shortage of costly bottles were flowing and what seemed like an invigorating modern spin on the series that once popularized the American torture porn sub-genre under the spell of boozy banter isn’t so pretty examined with a sober eye. As is, Spiral can barely stand on its own feet in the harsh light of day, walking a strange beat of clashing tonality and puzzling intentions. Rock’s jazzed-up energy, the movie’s grizzly gore, and the woke posturing simmering beneath it all add up to a bewildering WTF of a reboot that is as baffling as it is bizarre.

The script from Josh Stolberg and Pete Goldfinger, the duo behind 2017’s lame Jigsaw and 2010’s glorious Piranha 3D, is a weak collage of that whence came before in the franchise. We’re tired of playing this game and the movie seems to be tired of it too. In an attempt to refurbish the dingy torture-murder-antics, Spiral dispels with the kind of fundamental changes that a successful reboot would have required and instead opts to reskin the formula. It’s the same old bag except this time Chris Rock gets to do standup. Fortunately (I guess?), that’s the best stuff in the movie, even though it fits awkwardly on top of the gory imagery of severed tongues, cleaved fingers, and melted faces. It’s obvious that Rock is allowed to riff as he pleases, going into genuinely funny bits about Forrest Gump or cheating spouses that would fit perfectly into his future standup set. The rest of the humorless exchanges lack the raw, watchable energy of Rock with a notably poor supporting cast (Max Minghella and Samuel L. Jackson notwithstanding, both of whom clearly are enjoying their run here) spewing cop-speak dialogue that feels written by a bot that’s watched one too many CSI and Law & Order reruns. And speaking of being dated: there is literally a Twilight joke wallowing around in this movie. In 2021. A full nine years after the last movie in the series hit theaters. Pinch me, I must be dreaming. And this gets to the fundamental problem of Spiral: when a Saw movie relies on the laughs landing to fuel its watchability, you know that something has been horribly miscalculated. The open and closed case with Spiral is essentially that: when it’s not kinda funny, it’s actively bad.

The long and short of the plot involves yet another Jigsaw copycat killer who has his sights set on police reform. Rock plays Detective Zeke Banks, an upstanding cop who once committed the cardinal sin of turning on a corrupt brother in blue. Banks doesn’t play by the rules (per bad boy cop writing 101, he cannot play by rules) and as he begins to puzzle together the series of barbaric murders targeting police, the comedic verve is suffocated by self-serious ham. Flanked by new recruit William Schenk (Minghella), Banks lumbers from one elaborate bloodbath to the next, trying to solve a case that any discerning audience member is already ten paces ahead of, unskillfully sprinkling in the occasional gag to keep things flowing. And just as Charlie Clouser’s repetitively bombastic score is a familiar riff on a theme, there’s nothing about Spiral that proves that Saw has actually learned anything and moved beyond its root. It’s just more of the same but with new victims, a new killer, and new ways to die. The film and the production team behind it lacks the ability to self scrutinize and reflect on how to move the ball forward, crediting itself for reinvention while opting for lazy lateral shifts.

We’re kept on our toes more by the film’s frequently inept production than its twists and turns. There’s a dazzlingly discombobulating series of flashbacks (wherein Rock wears a backwards baseball cap to delineate the time jumps) meant to illustrate the fundamental moral wedge between Banks and fellow officers at his department but each and every instance is so clumsy and visually strange that you have to pinch yourself to remember that you’re not in the midst of some weird fever dream starring Chris Rock.

But why am I still beating around the bush? Anyone either still committed to the Saw name or just curious about what Rock has brought to the equation knows that Saw is synonym with its kills and that’s going to be the main thing that many people are talking about. “The kills damnit!”, I can hear the audience groan, “how are the kills?” Director Darren Lynn Bousman (the same man behind Saw II-IV) manages to stage some discomforting torture chambers but there’s little inventive or all that memorable here. Is it gory? Yes. Is it going to keep you up at night? Probably not. Is there anything new here? Almost certainly no. It’s the same asinine ticking time bombs where victims have to exact some ridiculous revenge upon themselves or die. This time out though, there’s no way for anyone to actually survive the Spiral Killer’s games, which in one silly sequence asks a victim to essentially cut off their own head… or be killed. At critical junctions though, Bousman fails the film’s professed mission (Saw* but with BLM) and he fails hard. One too many times, Bousman plays with loaded imagery with zero tact, co-opting Black trauma for the sake of empty spectacle. And that’s a game he shouldn’t play.

CONCLUSION: Chris Rock does his best to revive ‘Saw’ but his dynamic funnyman energy can’t save ‘Spiral’ from a weak script, bad acting, ugly cinematography, uninspired direction, and a wholly bungled critique of police brutality.