Chris Rock Goes Horror in 2021's Weirdly Underwhelming Spiral: From the Book of Saw
Welcome to the latest entry in The Great Catch-Up, a new feature where I go back and write about the many fascinating, important, great and wonderfully terrible films that have come out since this site was launched back in 2017 that I somehow never got around to writing about. YOU can help determine what I write about for this column by voting in polls at this site’s Patreon page at or by becoming a paid Subscriber for my Substack newsletter Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas here. Here the options were Spiral or Jigsaw and y’all chose Spiral.
When I learned that Chris Rock would be executive producing, script-doctoring and starring in 2021’s Spiral: From the Book of Saw I was surprised. Everyone was. Chris Rock seemed too big to star in a modestly budgeted Saw spin-off.
Rock wasn’t just too famous for a movie like Spiral; he had the wrong kind of fame as well. Rock was a movie star but more importantly he was one of our most respected and important stand-up comedians.
I still bust a gut thinking of this outrageous one-liner he told at the Academy Awards where he joked that Jada Pinkett-Smith, whose head was shaved because she has Alopecia, was going to star in G.I Jane 2. I shut off the television immediately after he finished the joke because I had something important to do but I’m guessing it went over well and that Will Smith and Jada Pinkett-Smith were good sports about the mild jape.
Famous funny people do not appear in eighth sequels to low-budget horror movies about a sicko and his sadistic games. Tim Conway didn’t just randomly star in the third Hellraiser movie. There isn’t a Phantasm sequel with Rob Schneider in the lead. Jim Carrey didn’t leverage his fame and popularity to score a plum role in a latter-day Texas Chainsaw Massacre sequel. Jerry Lewis didn’t insist on being number one on the call sheet on A Nightmare on Elm Street 4. The formerly funny Michael Myers doesn’t pop up alongside the even less funny Michael Myers in the Halloween series.
Yet Chris Rock, a performer widely considered one of the greatest stand-up comedians of all time, chose to work behind the scenes and in front of the camera on the ninth film in the Saw series and the first of what I can only hope will be a lengthy series of movies based on yarns from the Book of Saw.
I can only imagine the other stories contained within the mighty Book of Saw: tales of action and adventure, of patriotism and sacrifice, of love lost and love found, stories for children and stories for everyone.
Alternately, The Book of Saw just has a bunch of stories of people getting tortured and murdered in moderately inventive ways. We’ll find out in the years and decades ahead if further entries are titled A Prayer for Sister Maryanne: From the Book of Saw or Gruesome Slaughter: From the Book of Saw.
I read that in addition to starring in Spiral and executive producing, Rock would either write the story or work as a script doctor but he’s somewhat puzzlingly not credited for the film’s story or screenplay.
Rock stars in Spiral: From the Book of Saw as Detective Zeke Banks, a brilliant cop with a withering way with a wisecrack and the requisite messy romantic and personal life.
He’s a standard issue detective movie protagonist but he’s also very much the smart-ass Rock plays in pretty much all of his movies and onstage at his shows and hosting gigs and anywhere else he performs comedy.
Spiral: From the Book of Saw sets itself apart by not focussing on Tobin Bell’s John Kramer/Jigsaw, who is dead within this continuity but whose influence on the sick fucks of the world remains strong.
More importantly Spiral differentiates itself from the rest of the films in the series by being a Chris Rock action comedy that is also somewhat confusingly the ninth entry in a cheesy horror franchise.
Zeke is a good cop who turned in a corrupt partner, earning the eternal bitterness of his colleagues in the process. He’s seen as a snitch and a Nepo Baby, since his old man is a big timer played by Samuel L. Jackson.
Though John Kramer/Jigsaw is dead, and consequently less likely to torture and kill people for various moral transgressions than when he was living the city is soon afflicted with a wave of Jigsaw-style crime.
The Saw movies exist for the traps and the kills. They certainly are not wildly popular because of their exquisite dialogue, wonderful acting or intricate plotting.
Yet all of the kills here feel the same. Some lame-ass Jigsaw wannabe whose cadences reminds me unmistakably of Francis, the bully from Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, pop up on a video screen and taunts, “You only tipped waiters and waitresses 15 percent even when they provided exceptional service. Now you will only be allowed to keep 15 percent of your internal organs. You can survive by ripping out your spine and using it to poke out your eyes. But you must accomplish that within fifteen seconds or you’ll die. Choose life or death.”
They barely have time to even understand what’s going on before they die an excruciating death. The traps aren’t just sadistic; they’re impossible.
The traps and deaths are less important here because Spiral is a Chris Rock vehicle first and a horror movie second. Of course cops play a role in these movies as Jigsaw’s antagonists but they’ve never been as central to the proceedings as they are here.
In Spiral an unknown maniac has taken it upon themselves to continue John Kramer/Jigsaw’s work luring guilty people into killer traps they can only survive if they first destroy part of their own body and excruciating pain.
Only this derivative serial killer is specifically targeting the police department and its many corrupt officers, particularly those close to our hard-charging hero and his old man.
I suspect that part of Rock’s vision for Spiral: From the Book of Saw involved making the transgressions punished related to police corruption. Then again asserting that the police are corrupt in 2021 is less a political statement than a statement of fact.
Spiral: From the Book of Saw would be more convincing in its anti-cop convictions if it wasn’t predicated on getting the audience to root for its tough, profane, sexist but fundamentally good and moral cop protagonist to crack the case and get the bad guy.
Rock’s central presence keeps Spiral watchable even as it’s underwhelming and defiantly non-scary as a Saw movie and rote and overly familiar as a Chris Rock action-comedy.
Spiral travels an unusual route to mediocrity but it’s mediocre and forgettable all the same. Rock’s starring role lends an element of novelty but it’s not enough to make this anything more than a failed, weirdly unsatisfying experiment combining horror and laughs in a way that’s not particularly scary or funny.
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