 So like many other people I am horrified by what is currently happening to the Palestinian people in Gaza and frankly to Gaza itself. I've donated $225 to the UNRWA which is currently on the ground there providing aid and if you also have the means I implore you to support them or other humanitarian organizations there I have linked to some below. There's no good way to transition from this role. The opening joke to Chris Rock's 2018 stand-up special tambourine his first after a 10-year hiatus is one that feels like it will be relevant forever. You would think that cops would occasionally shoot a white kid just to make it look good. It's a good joke, it's a bad joke, makes you think kind of joke. Obviously people with no sense of humor and a very backwards view of the world will point to the fact that police do in fact shoot white kids sometimes as a defensive policing which is absolutely wild but those dummies ain't watching this youtube channel so we don't have to worry about them. Rock goes on to talk about the whole bad apple thing something we had heard a million times before and seemingly just as many since and the reality that some professions just can't have bad apples. You know if you are giving someone a gun and sending them out into society and there is even a 1% chance that they intend to do harm then we must take it as an absolute certainty. That was for my Batman v Superman superfan a cabbers. Is that a demo that exists? Probably not. Now I bring this up not just because it's a good point but because it's a good point made by the man who decided that the film that we're here to talk about should exist and pitched it to executives hungry to bring back a franchise that really seems like it should have died like 10 years ago and even if he didn't write or direct the movie his ideas are built into its fabric and so a film that I expected to be pretty straight Hollywood copaganda isn't and that's interesting hello by the way and welcome to the week air view you can call me largely back to normal and today I am talking about spiral from the book of saw now it is worth saying up front that I don't actually have super strong feelings on the soft franchise I obviously am a fan of the first one which stars fellow Sarah Lawrence alumnus Kerry Alwez I know it's a compliment to be compared to Wesley but good golly it happened so many fucking times in my four years there but only saw the second a few days ago it turns out that I had previously seen three and four but only remembered the former and I just skipped everything since frankly I didn't care very much now I like good splatter as much as the next guy but the lore of it all got to be a bit much so when it seemed like the series saw its final chapter a full four films after its antagonist had died I thought yeah that sounds about right and then it was brought back for jigsaw and I thought yeah that sounds about right and then it was over for a couple of years now to spiral's credit this is not a film about jigsaw or even a disciple of his well it obviously takes place in the same world as the saw films John Kramer's legacy exists in a purely superficial way this villain has taken jigsaw's aesthetic and methodology without concern for his philosophy transplanting them into a far more realistic and relevant context when I heard that comedian and comic actor Chris Rock had pitched a horror movie and that it was a saw spinoff I was pretty sure it wouldn't be great but could be a solid movie pass movie which is to say one that I would never spend money on to see in a theater but seems like it could be just interesting enough that I would go see it anyway because movie pass or one of its actually viable successors was footing the bill didn't need to be good when it's free and I was mostly right as it turns out except for the fact that my first trip to a movie theater in 14 months ended up being pretty pricey instead of reupping amca list I went to see spiral at the Alamo Draft House in Brooklyn meaning it was a $17.49 cent experience plus popcorn plus buffalo cauliflower wings plus milkshake and yeah the food's the real appeal I haven't been to the Alamo Draft House since I saw the black and white version of parasite and I was genuinely worried that it may be closed forever but it's back and I thought fuck it I'll write it off for my taxes the joke is that this channel doesn't actually bring in enough money to even count towards my taxes according to my parents accountant and you know it was lovely to be back I had missed it though I sure do wish it was easier for me to get to or that they had opened the original Manhattan location literally two blocks from where I used to live anyways the draft houses pre-show for this film was very pig heavy in its curation including the 1907 silent short the dancing pig and I didn't really think about why that might be until the opening scene showed a man standing on a box in a subway tunnel hung from the ceiling by his tongue over the tracks an old CRT turns on and a person in a pig mask tells the man that they would like to play a game this man is a cop who has been lying under oath and though he can survive by simply jumping from the box he will lose his tongue in the process for his crimes a train approaches and he does jump but not in time body parts splatter across the windshield the tongue hangs in the air and then it hits me oh right pigs an insult to an animal if ever there was one cut to chris rock doing stand-up not like actual chris rock doing actual stand-up but kind of currently undercover detective zeke banks is setting up a heist but first he's got some feelings about the words you can or can't say to describe forest gump and really that movie in general that he's got to get off his chest and the movie does that a couple of times pause to let chris rock do some bits that i could totally see him adapting for some onstage commentary it's not particularly incisive or meaningful or even necessarily funny but it's it's weird like rock isn't a credited writer on the film but it seems pretty unlikely that the pair of white men who penned the script put all those words into his mouth anyways banks is an outsider cop doing things his own way and while that is a bad trope that we have seen in virtually every single movie about a cop ever banks's motivations a little bit different usually they're outsiders because nobody believes in their above the law bullshit though of course their superiors always come around at the end and reward them for their human rights violations banks however is an outsider because he tried to use the system and got fucked by it he's a rat he was there as his partner shot a witness who planned to testify against a fellow officer and instead of just accepting that he snitched and snitches get stitches banks remains a pariah in his precinct someone who will call for backup and receive nothing but a bullet in the back the others will gladly let him die because he broke ranks and so he does his roguish thing because what else can he do you know fair i guess but when the tongue and badge belonging to that unidentified body on the subway tracks are sent to him at the precinct he gets to be in charge of this copycat killer case and all of these people who hate him suddenly have to work with him in theory and isn't that fun now as i mentioned this copycat killer is inspired by jigsaw style but not his substance he is not here to make folks appreciate their wasted lives but to punish them in poetic ways detongue a man who lies on the stand definger one who shot an unarmed kid etc it doesn't matter if on the other side they think life is worth living all that matters is that they cannot commit those crimes again and this sets up a very interesting and underexplored dynamic because on the one side you have banks a man who believes that the police can in theory be good but in practice are mostly bad and yet wants to reform things the quote unquote correct way and on the other hand you have the killer who believes the same thing but isn't interested in proper procedures this person in the far more relevant the subject matter pig mask isn't going after cops just because they're cops he's going after cops who have committed grave offenses early in the film someone says jigsaw never targeted cops which seems to have been written by someone who like didn't watch most of the saw movies that was kind of weird and they are offenses that quite frankly we all want to see them punished for like am i really supposed to feel bad that a dude who's shot a kid has to lose his fingers of course not that's great and and that bloodlust is exactly what the saw franchise has always been trying to tap into letting people watch fantasies they may have had when reading reports of particularly heinous criminals in the news play out and spiral is actually better about this than its predecessors because the crimes they're being punished for are things that bother me personally earlier entries definitely punish some deserving folks they don't rape us murders etc but they also go after sex workers and drug addicts and people who attempted suicide i don't feel any kind of catharsis seeing those people die gruesome deaths but that brings us to the philosophy of this all the ludicrously complex things that john kramer did ultimately came from a single simple idea those who don't appreciate life don't deserve life here he was a man diagnosed with terminal cancer who decided to end things on his own terms by driving off a cliff but he survived with a newfound appreciation for the time he had left and made it his mission to teach others the same lesson salvation through suffering and as an engineering superstar he also had the wherewithal to put together all kinds of wacky contraptions for a maximum efficacy now let's not pretend like the films themselves actually believe any of this they don't care about salvation many of the victims and the traps set for them feel arbitrary and lack a clear payoff spiral drops the pretense entirely and i appreciate the honesty but at the same time rewatching those earlier movies after the fact made it clear that this new villain is lacking on some level it's just bad storytelling if i told you everything about the killer's real backstory and motivations it wouldn't spoil the movie because you just wouldn't be able to figure it out it's treated as this big reveal but there's no lead-up or even attempt to misdirect you know we'll get some flashbacks explaining the whole thing but it's just like all right in truth the most important twist is only related to the killer in so far as they are the one to reveal it and the film doesn't put nearly as much weight into that revelation as it should which is so frustrating because that should be the moment where we see how banks and the killer are two sides of the same coin and do something with that but we don't and it's a problem because as much as i appreciate the acabiness of it that's just not a philosophy that can sustain a series there is an end point the killer has a specific plan punishing of cops for their misdeeds and their behavior will change and make a force that actually works for the people instead of against them it is a small scale but incredibly bloody revolution that puts the same fear that many people have of the police into the police themselves and fine but then what after that happens either they stop or they just become another serial killer john kramer's belief that humans are selfish in wasting their lives was something you could build a franchise on this new villain's clear specific goals aren't of course this wouldn't matter if the creators were committed to spirals subtitle from the book of saw which makes the film feel like a one-off entry in an anthology series of movies from the book of saw that take place in the same world but always feature new characters unfortunately the ending of spiral makes clear that this is intended to be its own series and though its opening weekend numbers were below projections i have no doubt that it will ultimately make back its low budget and justify another green light speaking of that low budget though spiral is different from most of its predecessors and then it looks like it wasn't shot entirely in a soundstage on a bunch of weird disconnected sets while it is in the same low budget realm as the rest of them it looks a lot less janky and that's appropriate because spiral is about something much more grounded than any saw movie and so it should be a bit more grounded the problem is that beyond the locations looking nicer it isn't really spiral features the same nauseating camera movements and stilted performances and ridiculous dialogue that have been in the series from the very beginning but here they feel less like choices and more like mistakes and that points to the most fundamental issue with spiral which is that despite new blood in the pit room and on screen this is still very much a saw production directed by the man behind saws two through four and written by the pair behind a jigsaw and i genuinely do not understand why going back to the anthology concept i think twisted pictures in linesgate could absolutely kill it if they went to a bunch of different new horror talents and said here's 20 million dollars to make a movie from the book of saw whatever that means to you now go and it seems like spiral could have been that but it's not and that's a shame 6.0 out of 10 thank you so much for watching thank you particularly to my patrons my mom hammering marco cat saracada benjamin schiff anthony coal magnolia dentin elliott fowler greg lucina liam knipe cojo phil bates willow i am the sword tomatown one timmo and folks who'd rather be read than said if you like this video that's great if not oh well if you want to see more please subscribe hope to see in the next one that was weird