Cop to It: SPIRAL: FROM THE BOOK OF SAW

Somehow certain film series get affection from me simply by hanging around long enough. I didn’t much care for the Saw movies as they came out — they’re grimy and gory and deliberately unpleasant in a lot of ways, not scary so much as gross and unrelenting — but as the years go by without them, I sort of miss their singular charms. I recall with fondness some of the intense traps — its villain Jigsaw was good about forcing people to saw off their own hands or swim through a pool of used needles or dig around in a corpse’s guts to free themselves — and memorable twists. I can appreciate the ugly precision of its best executed designs. They certainly did their thing and did it with more cheap thrills than the uglier imitators that oozed out afterwards. Now the whole thing has been revived with Spiral: From the Book of Saw, a film that stars Chris Rock as a beleaguered detective confronted with a Jigsaw copycat killer who is busy ensnaring crooked cops in new traps. The opening scene has a policeman known for lying on the stand — or so the filtered voice in a pig mask warbles out of a dusty tube television — hanging by his tongue in a subway tunnel. If he cuts it off, he can avoid the oncoming train. Devious, no? The movie immediately sinks into the flimsy slime of the familiar Saw style.

The movie sets up a potential with fresh ideas in the same old Saw, especially as we cut from the explosive splatter of the opening to Rock’s undercover cop doing a tight, funny two-minute riff on Forrest Gump. Although his presence in the lead turns some of the clunkier scenes into something out of a Saw parody, he brings a real investment in the gnarled ideas intertwined with the gore. His character is shunned by his colleagues for having turned in a crooked cop more than a decade ago. He’s still finding dead rats left on his desk. Now he and his new partner (Max Minghella) are on the trail of clues left by the mysterious killer. Even his ex-cop father (Samuel L. Jackson) thinks they’re in over their head. What’s smartest about Josh Stolberg and Pete Goldfinger’s screenplay is the way it makes the cops a deplorable bunch; we can understand where the sense of righteousness that powers the killer’s murderous impulses comes from. Even Rock, who is presented as the most honorable of the bunch, thinks nothing of breaking a suspect’s leg and then taunting him by poking at the bone while taking a selfie. Enlivening the ideas is the casting, the best novelty the picture has to offer. Rock looks like a fan enjoying sinking into the tropes, elevated with his simmering stone-faced smirks. And here’s the answer to the question you might not’ve asked: What if Samuel L. Jackson was in a Saw movie? “You want to play games? Let’s play games,” he snarls, calling the unseen killer his favorite four-syllable profanity.

Without these leads, this would be a far less worthy entry, as most of it is standard Saw stuff. The movie never quite lives up to its promise, despite a steady steam of nasty murder traps springing regularly — one killer cop gets his trigger finger pulled off; another goes missing only to have his tattoo delivered to a colleague in a gift box with the message “Am I getting under your skin?” — and the thrust of the picture gutsily saying the only thing scarier than a serial killer is a crooked cop. The investigation proceeds with clunky pacing, and the filmmaking, from series regular Darren Lynn Bousman, is jumpier than the meager shocks it has to offer. There’s little dread or horror here, and it's hard to work up an interest in the characters when most supporting roles are thinly drawn types. Even the potential sick catharsis of the revenge killings is occasionally underplayed by belated shorthand backstory explaining their issues. Both the ideas and the characters are often ill-served by the overripe old fashioned made-for-TV movie melodrama of the screenplay — including such confidently silly choices like a flashback in which a character is meant to be read as younger because their baseball hat is now backwards and his dad has sprouted a mustache. It’s par for the course for the franchise, which prizes its three-card-monte convolutions and nesting-doll backtracking. But who said cheap horror efforts adding a bloody beating social heart have to be tidy or sensible? To see the Saw series is to seesaw from squirming highs to spelunking lows. It comes with the territory, and in the uneven wobbling this one arrives at a potent finale. As the full picture emerges, the knotty vengeance rests on sharp understanding of cops' prejudices, and scratches certain itches. The final scene is a storm of reveals and guns and hidden double-layers in a trap that’s pulled with a sick logic. And that’s almost enough.

Bedeviled: HORNS

One morning, Ignatius wakes up to find a pair of devil horns growing right out of his forehead. Because this situation is based on the novel Horns by Joe Hill, who has inherited a flair for matter-of-fact macabre from his father Stephen King, we know that this isn’t a good sign. To make matters worse, Ig is currently the number one suspect in the murder of his girlfriend at the time of this new facial feature. Not a good time to start looking overtly devilish, but then again antlers are almost never a good look on a human person. Maybe Imogene of David Small’s picture book Imogene’s Antlers could pull it off, but even then only barely. It’s certainly not something most of us have to worry about.

Here, a charge of morbid curiosity regarding this development is ignited by two factors. One, Ig is being demonized by the press and becomes an embodiment of their stereotyping, an idea more fulfilling when explored in Gone Girl, but there’s room for both. Two, Ig is played by Daniel Radcliffe, sweet, pure, innocent, heroic Harry Potter himself. The film certainly wants us thinking about that, making some use of his screen persona to stack the deck. We’re supposed to be on his side right away, because surely Harry Potter wouldn’t murder his girlfriend. His history, and earnest performance, provides a modicum of transgression to scenes where he gets drunk, swears, smokes, has sex. He’s bad in quotation marks, a figure who’s literally no angel, the most literal Biblical allusion in a film full of them, including an Eve’s Diner, complete with a neon apple out front.

What’s odd about the freshly sprouting horns is how little others seem to notice, shrugging them off and going about their business. What’s especially strange is how small Ig’s reaction is. He goes to the doctor, and when that doesn’t help he just wanders around. They’re just another burden to bear. But he soon discovers the horns cause even worse reactions. They have the power to get people spilling their deepest, darkest secrets, allowing him to discover that the world is a perverse and ugly place held barely in check by a sense of propriety that fast erodes when he’s around. He goes to his parents (Kathleen Quinlan and James Remar) who instantly confess they think he killed the girl. “And she was my favorite thing about you,” his dad says. That hurts. He decides to use this thorny truth power to track down the real murderer and clear his name.

This is a fine concept, and Keith Bunin’s script allows the movie to glancingly incorporate a variety of tones and styles, creating a genre mélange that ends up a comic body horror thriller neo-noir supernatural murder mystery. But it thinks it’s weirder than it is. The revelations of his fellow man – one wants to binge eat, another wants to be a flasher, yet another’s a secret arsonist – seem rather pat, all things considered. And the gee-ain’t-mankind-the-real-monsters plotting gets lost in the execution that runs on a paranormal mystery the characters largely shrug at and a dead-girl mystery rotely developed and simply solved with limp twists and iffy effects. Plot threads involving Ig’s lawyer (Max Minghella), brother (Joe Anderson), a bartender (Kelli Garner), a waitress (Heather Graham), and his girlfriend’s father (David Morse), all stumble towards the conclusion with him to little effect.

Director Alexandre Aja has made a career out of going all in on bungled execution in horror movies like the ruinously twisted High Tension or the traumatic gleeful bloodbath Piranha 3D. With Horns he enthusiastically embraces every cracked corner of the concept, taking it far further than it should go, but not as far as it could. With lush colors and handsome photography, and a few unfortunately overplayed choices in needle drops, it goes from sudden outbursts of dark comedy and gore to surprisingly sweet (sometimes) childhood flashbacks that melt into borderline sexy young adult romance. These flashbacks, which give Juno Temple slightly more to the role of girlfriend beyond mere corpse, take us out of the main narrative, but it’s so ambling and rambling in the telling anyway that it only cuts off theoretical momentum. Give Horns credit for trying something new, even if it ends up only fitfully working.

Google Hangout: THE INTERNSHIP

The Internship is an amiable hangout movie. It’s little more than a chance to spend time with an appealing cast playing pleasant types. At the center of its appeal is the duo of Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, reteaming for the first time since their successful 2005 comedy Wedding Crashers. They’re both fast talkers, but where Vaughn muscles through with nonstop bravado, Wilson has a spacier syncopation. When both motormouths get up to speed, they find a fine, easy rhythm. This new comedy finds them surrounded by a capable cast that rises ever so slightly above glorified reaction shots in a plot that’s loose to put it generously. And yet I found myself enjoying sitting with this film much more than Crashers, which I’ve always found to be a tad on the grating side. I didn’t realize until I saw this one that my biggest problem with the earlier film was all that pesky plot. Sometimes a good, agreeable hangout is just what’s needed.

As the film begins, Vaughn and Wilson lose their jobs when the company they work for closes. Desperate to find better prospects, they bluff their way into summer internships at Google, where they quickly find themselves bewildered on the wrong side of a generation gap. The interns are placed into teams and the kids – a young manager (Josh Brener), a cute collegiate nerd (Tiya Sircar), a too-cool-for-school dude (Dylan O’Brien), and a self-conscious, socially awkward computer whiz (Tobit Raphael) – who get stuck with the old guys are none to happy about it. They’re an awkward bunch, but if you suspect they just might eventually, reluctantly learn to love each other and work as a team by using each member’s best skills you’d be on the right track. The team that wins the most points in various challenges over the summer, everything from coding to Quidditch, will win jobs at Google. Nods toward typical slobs (our protagonists) versus snobs (led by Max Minghella) plotting, as well as the basic competitive drive, make up the movie’s loose throughline.

It’s not often you find a light, summery comedy about how terrible the job market is. For a while, I remained unconvinced that it would work. But a funny thing happened as I sat there and let the movie play out: it won me over. The way the script by Vaughn and Jared Stern locates the anxieties of the two leads right inside the generation gap – they’re too young to ignore technology, too old to fully “get” it – becomes a somewhat productive dialogue. They grow progressively open-minded about younger people and new ways of doing things, while their teammates grow more open-minded about the value of input from people with more of an old school skill set. It’s a soft movie, but a few of the points it dances around are more perceptive than I anticipated. There’s a nice moment where Wilson and Vaughn chastise the younger interns for being so cynical about their future careers and when the response comes – “Do you even know what it’s like to be 21 today?” with a college degree no longer guaranteeing a job, if it ever was – they’re actually taken aback and consider it.

None of this would work without the cast. Director Shawn Levy, of Cheaper by the Dozen and Date Night, keeps the scenes casual and sociable, letting the ensemble fall into comfortable grooves to fill the scripted sequences with a bit of a loose feeling. Vaughn and Wilson have a relaxed chemistry that’s very appealing. Various supporting roles filled by the likes of Rose Byrne, Aasif Mandvi, and Josh Gad are fine bits of color around the edges. I was most taken with the work of O’Brien and Sircar, two of the college-aged interns who spar and banter with the main guys. Their winning performances are charming and feel like they’re circling some sort of generational truth, mediating their experience through smart phones and admitting to a technologically enabled imagination that’s wilder and more experienced than their real world lives to date.

This isn’t anything great, but it’s sweeter than expected. It’s refreshing to find a big studio comedy that’s just plain nice. (It’s also likely the only Hollywood comedy you’ll see in some time to purposefully allude to a Langston Hughes poem.) The movie hates jerks, lets characters feel bad about bad decisions, and angles for encouragement and hope above all else. It’s miles more humane and watchable than Ted or The Hangover Part II or any other corrosive-yet-popular comedy of the past several years. If this core decency leads the film into its biggest misstep, so be it. The approach to its setting feels miscalculated, so dewy-eyed about how great it is to work at Google – just shy of Wonka in the whimsy department, if the production design filled with pedal-powered conference tables and nap pods is to be believed – that it shoots past elaborate product placement and ends up feeling like it’s having a goof. Still, this is a movie that’s enjoyable to be around. Simply spending time together may not actually solve generation gaps, but it’s nice to think so for a couple hours.