Spiral: From the Book of Saw

Spiral is an interesting attempt to spin the Saw formula into a full-blown police procedural, and that ambition mostly pays off in fits and starts rather than as a cohesive whole. Chris Rock brings genuine dramatic weight to Zeke Banks, an ostracized cop whose backstory as the department's outcast gives the film real thematic potential around institutional corruption that it never quite commits to fully exploring. Samuel L. Jackson's presence as Zeke's father adds gravity even though the screenplay leans on tired father-son conflict clichés instead of digging into the more interesting tensions available. The traps themselves are inventive and the gore delivers for series fans, but the pacing feels hastily assembled and several plot twists land better than the connective tissue holding them together deserves. A genre appropriation experiment that's more interesting than most late-franchise Saw entries even when it doesn't fully succeed.