93 min | R | May 14, 2021 | Lionsgate
A killer starts murdering cops and leaving puzzle-box clues for the one detective everyone in the precinct already hates. Chris Rock plays it straight inside a franchise built on viscera. The premise has teeth. The movie pulls the punch.
Detective Zeke Banks works homicide in a department his own father once ran. A killer starts murdering cops with elaborate traps and addressing the taunts directly to Zeke. The setup grafts a corrupt-cop procedural onto the Saw machinery, and the killer’s targets are dirty police rather than random sinners. The film wants to be about a rotten institution policing itself through torture. It treats systemic corruption as a backdrop for the gore instead of the engine of the story.
Chris Rock plays Zeke as a man isolated by his own integrity, hated by colleagues who know he turned in a fellow officer years earlier. Rock leans into the anger and the burnout, and he is sharp in the interrogation scenes where he gets to talk fast and mean. The comic timing serves the character when Zeke is deflecting and fails him when the script asks for grief. Samuel L. Jackson plays Marcus Banks, Zeke’s father and a retired chief, with the swagger of a man who ran the place and knows where the bodies are. Max Minghella plays William Schenk, the green partner assigned to Zeke, with an eagerness that the plot uses as cover.
Darren Lynn Bousman directs his fourth entry in the series, and he stages the traps with the rusted industrial grime the franchise demands. Josh Stolberg and Pete Goldfinger write the procedural beats with no real interest in misdirection. The mystery telegraphs its answer through casting and screen time, so the reveal confirms what the audience worked out an hour earlier. The kills arrive on a metronome and the editing cuts away before the dread can build. Bousman shoots the flashbacks in a washed yellow that signals memory and adds nothing.
The film keeps gesturing at police accountability and never commits to the argument. A killer who tortures dirty cops is a provocation, and the script refuses to sit with what that provocation means. Rock is committed and the premise has a pulse the earlier sequels lacked. What surrounds him is a familiar machine that runs its traps and hits its marks and forgets to be about anything.