Chris Rock tries to revive the “Saw” franchise

 

   Someday, Chris Rock and Samuel L. Jackson may again find themselves in the same movie. Spiral: From the Book of Saw hints at what that movie might be, a story full of cutting banter and shrewd observation. But hints is all we get from Spiral, the ninth movie in the proudly revolting Saw franchise. 

   Spiral has the look and feel of  typically gritty police drama. But the movie's bloody acorn doesn't fall far enough from the Saw tree to refresh a series that has become a genre unto itself.

    Rock portrays detective Zeke Banks, a cop scorned by other cops because he once turned in his dirty-cop partner. 

    Jackson portrays Marcus, Zeke's father and a highly regarded former police chief. 

    Early on, a reluctant Zeke is assigned to work with a rookie partner (Max Minghella). Zeke's annoyance with Minghella's character isn't personal. As a victim of abuse from his fellow officers, Zeke doesn't want to work with anyone.

    The movie introduces another sadistic villain (unseen for most of the movie), a psychopath who specializes in torturing and murdering cops who've indulged their baser impulses.

    True to its Saw heritage, the movie creates sequences that are difficult to watch without wincing or turning away entirely. The villain creates elaborate devices that inflict horrifying forms of pain.

    The murderer gives his targets a chance to save themselves. A cop who routinely lied can trigger a mechanism that will cut out his tongue. Should he decline, the terrified officer will be smashed to a bloody pulp by an oncoming subway train.

   Amazing how in Spiral, murderous devices always seem to work. No short circuits. No design failures --- and no  relation to the mechanical woes most of us occasionally encounter.

    As Capt. Angie Garza, a cop who still believes in Zeke, Marisol Nichols scores one of the few significant female roles.

    Director Darren Lynn Bousman, who directed three previous Saw movies, creates a convincing cop atmosphere -- at least as we know it from other amped-up movies. But at a time when police behavior has garnered more than the usual attention, Spiral  doesn't exactly further the conversation.

    Unapologetically committed to his portrayal and to genre demands,  Rock again shows that he doesn't need to be confined to comedy. In Spiral, though, he can’t escape the downward pull of two worn-out genres: pulpy police procedurals and gag-inducing horror.

     

Elle Fanning receives a showcase

Sometimes, critical standards need to be twisted a bit. That's how I felt about Teen Spirit, a somewhat flimsy Max Minghella-directed variation on a Star is Born theme that places Elle Fanning in a starring role. No one is going to confuse Fanning's Violet with a character from Chekhov, but Teen Spirit bounces its way into theaters with a tailwind of energy behind it and a commanding performance from Fanning. A young woman living on the Isle of Wight, Fanning's Violet wants to sing. Her singing voice -- yes, it's really Fanning's -- proves stronger than anything Violet might say in normal conversation. Fanning makes it clear from the start that Violet isn't happy living with her Polish immigrant single mother (Agnieszka Grochowska). While singing to a sparse audience at a local bar, Violet meets an unlikely mentor, a disheveled Croatian (Zlatko Buric) who once was an opera star and now seems to be a drunk. Initially timid about the possibility, Violet quickly decides to enter a local talent contest. The winners will appear on a nationally televised talent show called Teen Spirit. Minghella fully embraces the absurdity of a story in which an opera star helps fashion a rock idol. He wisely refuses to wink at the brazen obviousness of any of the conceits in the screenplay, which he also wrote. Look, I'm not arguing that Teen Spirit ascends the ladder of greatness; I am saying that the highly energetic Teen Spirit gives Fanning a well-deserved showcase and that she takes full advantage of it. She creates a character who -- as her coach advises her -- sings from the heart.

Two women in a world without power

We've seen so many post-apocalyptic movies that if the real thing ever arrives, it's likely to feel anti-climactic. Still, audience familiarity with end-of-the-world scenarios hasn't stopped director Patricia Rozema from adapting a 1996 novel by Jean Hegland. In Into the Forest, Ellen Page and Evan Rachel Wood play sisters living in the northwestern woods with their father (Callum Keith Rennie). Trouble arrives when the family's home is engulfed by the darkness of a power outage. It soon becomes clear that the outage is neither temporary nor isolated. For reasons that never are explained, the outage has afflicted the entire US, maybe the whole world. Eventually Rozema's movie becomes a kind of meditation on living without electrical power, which means no Internet, no recorded music, no lights or phones. After a few weeks, gas is impossible to find. Page's Nell takes a pragmatic approach to survival while Wood's Eva harbors the illusion that she still can pursue her dream of becoming a dancer. Although mostly a two-hander, Rozema makes room for some men including a young man (Max Minghella) who tries to entice Nell into heading east with him, and an unwanted intruder (Michael Edlund) whose presence adds an ominous dimension to the sisters' struggle. You probably can tell from what I've said that Dad doesn't make it much past the first act. Page and Wood play an interesting duet, although Rozema can't always maintain enough tension, and the story too obviously becomes a fable about the power of sisterhood. Still, Into the Forest can't be accused of following the usual eruptive formula; it may be the quietest post-apocalyptic movie ever made.