I know this came out years ago, but come on, I just found it in a bargain bin! And fortunately, everything I remember from it is still relevant. Mainly, I have two big gripes with this film:
- The theme is so explicit it feels like a first or second draft script. “You’re a good cop Zeek.” “He’s a crooked cop Zeek.” “I get shot in the back. I’m Zeek.” We get it. The theme is corrupt cops. Can you please not shove it down our faces? Themes are so much better when done under the surface.
- Do we really want the “good guys” to win? The stakes of the movie are “come clean or crooked cops die,” and to be fair, even though it came out during the George Floyd era and things have only gotten worse, do we really want anything other than death? Like even Saw III managed to make a child killer look at least salvageable. Here, I was hoping for death because I knew that coming clean would yield, in the real world, no consequences.
That being said, I really wish they made more movies with this limp wrist Billy the Puppet. I love the sassy voice, I love the marionette style, I wish the traps were more mechanical but that’s a me issue.
At the end of the day, I’m a sucker for engineering torture porn. And this is no exception, even if they have to shove the theme so far down my throat I become their ventriloquist dummy.
