“This is a very weird turn for the series.
On one hand, the Jigsaw portion is pretty solid. The lesson to be learned is actually fairly coherent and straightforward, which is totally how this should work in a Saw movie. I mean, Saw 3’s lesson is your kid died, get over it? Eh, seems A BIT flimsy.
The traps are fine, and there’s a little bit of a mystery to unravel with the characters, and even though that’s a little bit of a shrug, the Jigsaw portion is a solid B, does something different without doing something stupid.
The police procedural on the other hand, woof. We watch in painstaking detail as Luke uncovers things we already know, zero mystery there, and the Jigsaw lesson he’s meant to learn makes no sense.
Hear me out: the Jigsaw thing is about tailored, um, experiences meant to address an individual’s issues and ways they are wasting their lives.
Luke is tracking down a serial killer, doing a decent job of it, and he doesn’t seem to have any glaring character flaws. Stopping a serial killer seems to be well within a good use of one’s life. So why is he supposed to learn to trust a guy that he definitely should not trust? Maybe he’s got other trust issues, but those weren’t on display. I dunno, this part just doesn’t soar on bloody wings.
So we have a good Jigsaw setup mashed into a movie with a terrible police procedural, and Luke deserved better.
All I can say is that I’m pretty sure, by this point in the series, the creators were like, Fuck, if we’d known this thing would go this deep into sequels, we definitely wouldn’t have killed off John Kramer so fast.
Overall, not terrible, but not great, and the makers of Spiral saw this Saw and took the exact opposite lesson from it that I did: What if we really focused on the police procedural instead of the Saw stuff? Wouldn’t that be cool?
No, as it turns out. It would not.”