Protagonist Ezekiel Banks, a detective and a black man, has just made it to the Spiral Killer—who has viciously come after an department of wayward police officers for offenses like murder. Ezekiel's father Marcus was once the chief. The killer has Marcus (played by Samuel L. Jackson) suspended in the air by a series of wires as he is drained of blood. A SWAT team approaches. The killer wants Ezekiel to join him, with his father going free upon this condition. When Ezekiel complies enough with the killer's instructions to lower Marcus to the ground, the SWAT team incidentally triggers the mechanism to lift him upright. Lights turn on behind Marcus to obscure him. Shortly, a baton-like shape extends down above his right hand, and the wire for his right arm makes it appear from his outline that he is aiming a firearm at the team. Going far beyond what is necessary to actually neutralize a threatening person, they fire at him more than enough times to kill him.
The lights do not even activate until after the SWAT units have entered the room; they saw or could have somewhat seen the predicament of Ezekiel's father before the puppetry meant to make Marcus appear hostile. On two counts, the SWAT team acted far more aggressively than the situation called for. They ignored visual evidence of his captivity while it was easier to access that evidence and did not stop shooting until well after enough shots to end his life. Tragically, Ezekiel running out to deter the police after fighting the Spiral Killer did genuinely distract their attention away from Marcus before the backlighting made it more difficult to tell what he was doing. And Ezekiel shooting a target to lower his father before they entered did make it seem like someone, whom Marcus was perhaps mistaken for, was actively shooting at another person.
The Spiral Killer would probably dismiss this because he would simply want Marcus dead in the absence of Ezekiel's cooperation anyway (Marcus encouraged very utilitarian, unjust police measures), but he is relying upon the very willingness to quickly shoot someone before they have been caught doing something warranting this reaction that contributed to his hostility towards many of the police in the first place. There is inherent hypocrisy in opposing police who use their power recklessly or maliciously and then staging a plan to punish a police figure using that same sort of unjust violence. It only deepens the hypocrisy when the killer insists he is trying to help Ezekiel save his father when he is the one who kidnapped him and put him in a murderous situation to begin with (at least he does not pretend he is not killing people as John Kramer did!).
As for racism, especially against black people, while the cast of Spiral is diverse and the police brutality severe, there is never any hint that racism specifically drives any of the police murders or other acts of oppression. Perhaps this would have been different if it had instead been written and filmed after 2020. In the context of American police practices and controversies, the ending nonetheless remains defeaning in its relevance to racism against black people: a black man is shot because it looks to the approaching police officers that he is brandishing a firearm, when he in reality is being held up like a puppet by a contraption. A few moments of better examination, and it could have been easily discernible that he did not have a gun.
The police in Spiral almost certainly are not motivated by racism because they are generally potrayed as a menace to almost everyone outside of their ranks. Again, the movie is not about racist police, but about aggressive police and less discriminatory expressions of corruption. But the film still addresses issues very adjacent to America's particular woes regarding police brutality against black people and sexism against men—so many black men would probably not be reportedly murdered or otherwise mistreated by the police if they were women instead, or at least not to the same extent of physical violence, though the color of their skin would still be a target for certain officers.
That Marcus and black men who are shot very hastily in real life are men is absolutely part of the prevalence of unjust police force against black males, since men are assumed by many to be naturally violent or more deserving of harshness. Either way, a black man connected with the police hierarchy of Spiral is killed by police because he only seems threatening. At the same time, movie is not specifically about the racism (and sexism) in America that this parallels. The ending scene is very nuanced as all of these facts overlap. Though the situation is arranged to provide Ezekiel an incentive to join the Spiral Killer, it is actually far more layered thanks to the hypocrisy of the new Jigsaw figure and the significant similarities of its reckless police actions to those associated with additional forms of irrationality and mistreatment directed towards specific demographics.
Spiral stumbles in some ways, but in isolation and in the context of the greater film, its ending is incredibly well-executed. One could not know from Marcus being black how intentional the parallels between this in-universe example of police brutality and those in America are. Still, in addition to being an artistically excellent scene that directly explores the nature of police brutality all on its own, its relationship with both the rest of the movie (with its bold but valid lack of racist characterization) and real life reports elevates it even more. Spiral in fact has one of the most philosophically deep endings in a cinematic franchise teeming with philosophically charged endings.
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