SPIRAL: FROM THE BOOK OF SAW

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND OH, THAT'S NASTY

It's been a long time. Streaming, DVDs and Blus are all very well but cinema will always be the best way to watch a film. The last time I actually stepped into a cinema was last October for a pre-Halloween retro screening of Carrie, and I've missed it. And it's nice that they're reopening with not just a horror film, but a new entry in one of my favourite horror brands. For some, the Saw series may be as synonymous with so-called torture porn as the Hostel movies (at least the first two; the third was terrible) but I always enjoyed the inventive kills, the ludicrously convoluted plotting and the occasionally revolting full-on gore, and I had more fun and got more laughs from the joke-free carnage and narrative insanity than I ever derived from overt comedies. Recently I binged the first seven Saw films on BluRay over a weekend and caught myself giggling on several occasions.

Like those who stubbornly insist that there are only three Die Hard movies, I didn't really count Jigsaw as a proper Saw film despite the presence of Tobin Bell as Jigsaw himself, who of course got killed at the end of Saw III but whose spectre hung around the next five episodes through restagings of scenes from earlier films, video and audio recordings, backstory and flashbacks. Bell doesn't make an appearance this time out except as a photograph in a case file as the motley crew of city homicide cops attempt to track down a new Jigsaw copycat who's apparently taking down dirty and corrupt cops. Hotheaded detective Zeke (Chris Rock, who is [1] also an executive producer and [2] terrible) commands no loyalty from his squad of dodgy officers, even as Jigsaw Mark II seems to be picking them off one by one....

Spiral: From The Book Of Saw starts promisingly with a bad cop challenged to rip his own lying tongue out before a subway train smashes into him, but stalls quickly with Rock apparently inserting chunks of standup routines that would have been ill-advised if standup Chris Rock wasn't an executive producer (one of the great things about the Saw movies was the lack of jokes about Forrest Gump and cheating wives). And then it launches into a welter of old-fashioned cop-on-the-edge, my-dad-was-a-cop, I-don't-want-a-rookie-partner, you're-too-close-to-the-case histrionic shouting matches that in a sane world would have ended with give-me-your-gun-and-your-badge. While the killer's motivation makes a measure of sense, the logistics don't: how did they get all that equipment together? (John Kramer was a mechanical engineer and wealthy with it, which is not the case here.) How did they know that Cop A would do this and Cop B wouldn't do that? Why do the cops not notice that one of their own team hasn't reported in to work today? And what's with the jet-powered glass-throwing machine that launches shards of beer bottles across the room for no apparent reason?

Certainly the film earns it's dazzling blood-red 18 certificate (I dread the day a Saw movie wimps out with a popcorn-friendly 15) with its agreeably high quota of ripping grue: tongues ripped out, skin ripped off, fingers ripped from their sockets, and Darren Lynn Bousman handles the torture stuff as well as any of the previous films did (three of which were his, and fellow Saw sequel helmers Kevin Greutert and David Hackl get named in the end credits crawl). And there's a nice warm glow of familiarity about the final putting-the-pieces-together montage with another version of Charlie Clouser's terrific theme. Social comment, something the series only occasionally approached, is there with a timely theme of police brutality, corruption and accountability. But the truth about it is that Spiral: From The Book Of Saw isn't really a Saw movie, it's closer to a Se7en movie in which mismatched cops track down a serial murderer with a meticulously structured masterplan and a grand social agenda of punishment that's also specifically personal to the cops involved. That's not a bad thing, and there was talk at the time of a sequel to Se7en, called Ei8ht, which would have actually been appropriate in this case.

Bottom line: if you can get past Chris Rock's tiresome wisecracking, the cliched and cardboard cutout cop characters who mostly deserve it, and the strange sense of Samuel L Jackson being in it too much (because he's a huge stellar presence that overwhelms everyone and everything else) and at the same time not enough (because he's always enormously watchable), there is plenty of grisly fun to be had, and if you're just after the physical horror then there's still enough screaming and mutilation to satisfy. It's not one of the best entries, and after Saw 7 the series had probably run its course, but I enjoyed it. And it was just the kind of movie I wanted to see on cinema's long-overdue return. That said, enough now.

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