I want to play a game… 

The famous words of the Saw series that spawned a gang of sequels and 1 reboot (if you will) but this new Spiral movie takes a timely approach with an interesting twist.

Full Disclosure: It’s been YEARS since I’ve seen any of the SAW movies, mainly because it started getting repetitive for me with each attempt to one up the gore porn. So with that being said, the only thing that pulled me back into the franchise was Chris Rock. Obviously known for his comedic stand up performance and movies. I thought it would be awesome to see Chris in a more dramatic feature plus hearing that he helped write the new story w/ James Wan and Leigh Whannell, it had me curious. And of course he delivers and steals every scene in the movie but unfortunately for him, the plot of the movie felt a bit lazy while the “torture” scenes were rushed and somewhat predictable.

Without giving away too much, Chris Rock plays Detective Zeke Banks, who’s shamed for turning in his dirty partner and is reminded about it every day of his career. One day, he’s assigned a new partner, Max Minghella (The Handmaiden’s Tale), and a series of thumb drives show up along with body parts of other “dirty cops” in his department. This time, our killer dawns a pig mask, while the cycling clown is replaced with a pig puppet in an officers uniform. Here’s the thing, and I’m going off my memory here, I was really hoping for more creative ways to “play the game” if you will but I won’t lie when I say I did cringe at two of the scenes. But out of all the Saw movies, this one had THE LEAST amount of deaths, totaling to 5, with 1 of them not really being shown.

I can appreciate the premise of taking something timely as police reform and using it as a theme for the movie however with it’s predictable story and lack of gore, torture and learning valuable lessons of the game, it felt more like a purge movie than something from the Saw franchise. Oddly enough, with all the issues this movie had, I still had a fun time watching it as I’m sure they had fun making it. You can definitely skip watching it in the theaters but maybe a good date night movie you can stream at home.