Spiral

 

The Saw franchise of eight (or nine) splatter films (depending on if you count Chris Rock's latest movie, Spiral) were successful because they walked the line between the plausible and implausible in the games of deadly entrapment the homicidal maniac Jigsaw devised to test or punish his victims (again, depending on your POV). Darren Lynn Bousman directed three pictures in the original series and has returned to tweak that winning formula while keeping the ironic sadism front and center. The results are mixed and if the ending is to be believed, this might be the start of another bloody series.

Rock plays an exasperating city detective who is also the son a former chief of police (Samuel L. Jackson). He has found himself on the bad side of nearly every cop in the department because of his renegade, showman ways. Rock's cynical Zeke Banks is teamed with rookie William Schenk (Max Minghella) , whose eager young lawman Banks finds annoying. This allows Comedian Chris Rock to riff on a few of his favorite topics -- himself and his marriage, sex, infidelity, divorce and porn (they are not unrelated). I feel this is the film's biggest weakness: It does not ask Rock to drop the stand up and fully invest in this other persona. This lends the picture an uneven tone. This is not a buddy cop dramedy.

The Banks / Schenk team, a familiar pairing to even casual moviegoers, is assigned the investigation of the contraption murder of a fellow detective, one of the few officers who didn't hate Banks. Soon, the investigation starts to sprawl as other cops are killed horribly and the murderer sends bait to Banks to keep him engaged. It's not just the killings that are messy here. The pacing of this story is strange, the narrative arc pitted with holes and shortcuts. Too much of the story relies on flashbacks and backstory reveals and not enough on actual detective work. That Banks eventually comes face-to-face with the killer is not because he's a skillful detective but because the puppet master knows his victims so well.