Movie Review: Spiral: From the Book of Saw (2021)

Let’s just get this out of the way: Do not watch this. There are spoilers in the last couple of paragraphs, but we are hoping we can spare some of you and that you will just trust us and not watch it. And if you do, we hope you watch it out of morbid curiosity about how bad it is and for the unintentional comedic entertainment value it provides.

Spiral: From the Book of Saw is not good. It’s not just that it isn’t a good entry in the Saw franchise. That’s definitely also true. It just isn’t good in about every way imaginable. Take a moment to look at this picture below. This is peak Chris Rock acting in Spiral. This is the expression he makes in just about any situation. It’s literally the same expression he has in the poster of this film.

Let’s start there, and talk about Chris Rock for a moment. Rock plays Detective Zeke Banks. He was a terrible choice for this role. He’s not known for his versatile acting abilities. He’s known for comedy. Rock has several scenes where the comedy is very forced. Not only that, but it sounds like he is reading right from the script in most places. So not only is the comedy bad but it’s also poorly delivered like every other line. This is not a good combination. Why he was selected for this shit-show of a “Saw” film is beyond us. This is a franchise that deserves better. He even used an old joke about Forrest Gump that has already been a meme for years.

Beyond the travesty that was the decision to put Chris Rock into this film, let’s talk about Saw and its relevance in Spiral. It’s pretty nonexistent. This could have pretty much been any shitty CSI-type killer copycat. The fact that they drug Saw through the mud and pretty much drowned it there for this film is just a shame. Any reference to the Saw franchise is very subtle which was surprising because it was directed by the same director from Saw II, Saw III, and Saw IV.

Spiral: From the Book of Saw actually plays out more like a parody of the original franchise than anything. The writing is just all over the place. There are the forced stand-up comedy bits, scenes that just make no sense, bad dialogue, and no consistency. The voice of the killer in the recorded messages (which are now on USB thumb drives now) sounds hilarious. It’s like they had Adam Driver record them in an exaggerated Kylo Ren voice. The traps, which the franchise is known for, were boring and felt uninspired in comparison to any other entry in the franchise. There was a scene where Zeke reaches into a car to get some evidence without a glove, grabs it, and then shows a glove on his hand after the cut. This is just sloppy and something even indie films wouldn’t have missed. Who was even editing this?

They also seem to not only disregard the other films almost entirely, but it seems like they had never even seen a Saw film before. At one point they even say that Jigsaw didn’t target police. Jigsaw has actually killed a lot of police in the previous films.

Samuel L. Jackson is in this film for…. reasons? He plays Marcus Banks, who is the father of Zeke (Chris Rock’s character). That would make Jackson’s character a dad at 16 if we go by their real age. To make them look younger in flashbacks, Zeke has his hat on backward with a mustache, and Marcus has a mustache as well. It looks very comical. This entire dynamic just didn’t need to exist. But they needed Marcus for the final scene. Jackson didn’t add any value to this film. He was just kind of there. (Spoilers below.)

We really tried to find some kind of redeeming quality that we could say made it at least worth a watch, but there are none. Whoever approved this script when it was presented to them should be fired. The script was bad, but they also decided to throw some police politics in there to round off this mess of a film. There is a puppet that can be seen in a couple of scenes that is holding a gun. It really doesn’t have any relevance until the end, when Zeke finds that his dad is in a trap dangling from some wires like a puppet (like the puppet we had seen in a couple of scenes earlier in the film). Not only that but he has apparently lost about eight gallons of blood while hanging there. That is a lot of blood!

So, all of the nonsense in the film leads up to Zeke finding his dad hanging here. At this point, Marcus has been drained of over five times the blood of a normal human adult but he’s still alive and still able to speak. When the police finally show up, the door opens which triggers the contraption to raise Marcus’ arm up that has a gun mechanism attached. The police yell at him to drop it, which he clearly isn’t able to do and then proceed to unload hundreds of bullets into him in slow motion. It seems like this entire film was built around this scene, but it just didn’t make a lot of sense much like the rest of it. If there was some kind of message to be found, it was poorly delivered and wasted, and the film just abruptly ends there.

In closing, we would just say to not ever watch this. We actually did find that it was entertaining in the most unintentional way possible, but it definitely wasn’t worth the $20 rental fee. Spiral adds absolutely nothing of value to the franchise or horror and should be avoided at all costs.