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.
