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.

A Fish Called PIRANHA

Piranha in 3D is a disappointment in all three dimensions, though not for lack of trying. Alexandre Aja’s movie is a winking horror-comedy with a tongue so firmly in the cheek that it draws blood. It’s gratuitous in every possible way, up to and including its very existence, with something sure to offend every large portion of the general public, and yet the film never manages to generate any real transgressive charge. By the end of the run time, when the credits started to roll, I found myself thinking, “is that all there is?”

Aja’s always been a fine stylist of horror imagery, but I’ve found his prior works to be shockingly lacking, with High Tension and Mirrors containing plot holes so large and shocks so predictable that any sense of fun or danger is entirely missing. His small stylistic touches weren’t enough to alleviate my pure boredom with those projects. With Piranha, a remake of Joe Dante’s 1978 Roger-Corman-produced Jaws-inspired creature-feature, Aja has created his best film, but it’s still a disappointment. I liked just enough of it to wish it were better.

The movie starts promisingly enough with small-town sheriff Elisabeth Shue investigating a missing local (Richard Dreyfuss) and welcoming a team of geologists, led by Adam Scott, who are investigating recent seismic activity in the area. All of this is set against the backdrop of a busy Spring Break weekend that has brought hoards of idiotic amoral pleasure-seekers to writhe in the water. There’s a seedy carnival atmosphere taking over the town with slimy video producers (Jerry O’Connell and Paul Scheer) and a sleazy wet-T-shirt contest host (Eli Roth) playing ringmasters to the debauchery. It’s not a good sign that Shue’s teen son (Steven McQueen, Steve’s grandson) gets pulled into the craziness. And you know things are out of control when not even Ving Rhames with a bullhorn can command the crowd’s attention.

Of course, there are even bigger problems than crazy college kids. Those would be the thousands of starving prehistoric piranha that the aforementioned seismic activity has unleashed. Local scientist Doc Brown, I mean, Mr. Goodman (played by none other than – great Scott! – Christopher Lloyd) has grave pronouncements to make about the deadliness and danger brought by these aquatic killers. The opening scenes, and perhaps even half of the movie, alternate between scenes of ridiculously vulgar partying and swift, ominous shadows darting through the water. By the time the piranha attacks arrive, I was good and ready for some creepy-cool 3D comeuppances.

Rather than spacing them out through the length of the film, the majority of the deaths occur during one long bloody massacre of Spring-Breakers in what can only be described as the goofy gory centerpiece of the film. To be sure, some of the deaths are quite witty, like when a particularly buxom babe gets sucked underwater with, seconds later, two silicone spheres floating to the surface. It’s also a chilling rush to see hundreds of people thrashing through the water past their dying friends, capsizing boats and rafts while piranhas get blown away with shotguns and sliced to bits with boat motors. The water runs red with the blood of man and beast alike. But, after a while, what starts as horror-movie fun just grows sad. There’s a consistent, persistent intensity to this sequence that becomes literal overkill. The violence is so vivid and so sustained that it moves well past its purpose.

After the massacre we are given some perfunctory scenes of action and incident that are meant to resolve the immediate peril of the surviving characters. But then, it’s over. There’s a nice, shocking punchline that sends us into the credits (albeit one that’s front and center in the advertising), but the sense of disappointment is tough to shake. Sure, Shue’s family gives the movie a nice through line, but there’s little else of narrative interest. As the credits rolled, I found myself in a state of disbelief. The movie feels unfinished, like screenwriters Pete Goldfinger and Josh Stolberg wrote two-thirds of story and then never got around to writing a proper climax. The massacre makes for an overlong climax when it really feels like it should be the midpoint. I didn’t exactly enjoy the movie, but I wish it were longer.

Then again, this is a movie that really only promises to give you people being eaten by piranhas in 3D. It succeeds on that count. But the violence would have gone down better if it weren’t so confined in mostly that one sequence. And when the movie comes stocked with such charismatic performers like Lloyd and Rhames, Shue and Scott, is it wrong to expect that they be given something to do? They barely have a chance to stretch their genre muscles. Aja has made a movie that’s in the spirit of all kinds of fun, trashy low-budget horror flicks, but he is much more successful at bringing the trashy than making it fun.