El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie

**SPOILERS HEREIN**

Breaking Bad was one of the of the most beloved and acclaimed continuing television dramas ever made, and a rare one that pulled off an ending almost everyone liked. In fact, it sort of gave us two endings: the blaze of glory in the series finale, and the utter tragedy of “Ozymandias” two episodes prior (which I and others contend would have also worked as an ending). Both were satisfying in different ways.

But while the show brought the story of Walter White (Bryan Cranston) to a thorough conclusion, it didn’t quite find time to do the same for Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul). Walt’s former student and partner in crime—if never quite an onscreen equal to his old teacher, then at least the second most important and compelling character—became scarcer in the final season, and then drove off with little closure to his arc. Thus, we have El Camino, a coda that I’m sure will colloquially be called a bonus episode by many a viewer, but more accurately feels like a direct sequel. In any case, it’s a worthy successor and denouement to one of the most masterful shows to ever air.

The movie picks up immediately after Jesse’s final scream cut off in the finale (before the cops arrive after Walt’s massacre of the neo-Nazi gang, even), and extends it into a cry of anguish, not one of victory like the last episode made it seem. The fairly triumphant tone of the series’ final scene is absent and stays absent throughout, or at least muzzled. I’m not sure how long creator and director Vince Gilligan had these ideas in mind, but it seems appropriate that this final chapter comes a length of time after Braking Bad finished. Big, explosive sequences that leave an impression on viewers are more appropriate for final episodes. El Camino is about the aftermath of those big moments, and where the survivors go from there. It’s a similar vibe to the scenes of Walt’s exile in the show’s penultimate episode “Granite State.”

The story follows Jesse, his partner definitively dead and himself a fugitive, as he seeks out some money stashed away by one of his now-deceased captors so he can buy himself a new identity from Saul Goodman’s vacuum guy (Robert Forster). It’s a story that could have been told in a normal-length episode, with enough time left over for a subplot or two about the White family (none of whom appear, save for a cameo from Walt). But it’s a masterfully slow burn, building the type of seething tension one instantly recognizes from the show’s best moments. It plays like a sleek, somewhat self-contained little noir film, and Scott MacArthur is an appropriately mean foil. Not a Gus Fring or a Salamanca, not quite a forgettable one-and-done bad guy-of-the-week, just a real simple and nasty low-level criminal.

It also pads the length out to two hours with some overdue moments of mood and character. Jesse as a character never took to the coldblooded parts of the drug trade like Walt did, and the depictions of his damaged psyche (especially the season 4 scenes of him haunted by his first murder) were forceful and unsubtle, and so effective for it. El Camino tackles the trauma from his captivity at the hands of the Nazis (which Breaking Bad had little time to grapple with) much the same way, through pained silences that say so much, and flashbacks and apparitions that are haunting and intense.

It’s here where we get much of the character cameos, and surprisingly, it’s not all a load of fan service. Well, Walt’s kind of is (despite some dialogue that’s relevant to the proceedings, it feels like the most tacked-on of the bunch), but otherwise, they’re all worked in organically and fit the narrative. None more effectively than Todd’s (Jesse Plemons), whose horrific sequence plays like a black comedy with all the comedy drained out. Even for this series and this era of mature content, that might’ve been too much to show on basic cable.

It’s Aaron Paul’s show, however, and he’s so arresting he could have carried the movie even without any flashbacks bolstering or underlining his character’s mindset. Cranston was often so phenomenal as Walt that one could forget that Paul was also pretty excellent on the show as Jesse. With Heisenberg’s shadow absent in all but one scene, that doesn’t happen here (and that one scene comes late, after Paul’s been shining bright like a journeyman actor who knows this is a star-making role). Paul expertly conveys a man broken by one injury or devastation after another, but also sort of built up and made stronger by them.

But, not necessarily on the same path to ruin as Walter White. The climax of El Camino lets Jesse play action hero (or in this case, gunslinger) like his partner in “Felina,” but much more understatedly. Subsequently, he gets an ending somewhere between the two Walter got, melancholy but open-ended and contemplative. Jesse certainly broke bad and did some terrible things, but he was never fully consumed by the abyss like Walt. Maybe he has still a hope that his ex-teacher lost somewhere along the way (or perhaps never had in the first place). And that ending is, in its own way, very satisfying.

Joker

Well, you have to give Todd Phillips credit for something. Not for taking the superhero movie in a new direction, mind you (at least not any good one). Aside from a few shared names, Joker’s connections to its source material are so few that it feels like it's embarrassed of its DC Comics origins, a notion the writer-director-producer has done little to contradict in his public statements about the picture.

What Phillips has given us is the genre’s first unabashed piece of Oscar bait, aiming to beat Marvel to being the first Best Picture-winner after Black Panther broke the dam by being nominated just this year. Thus, Joker not only removes all the fun and fantastical “comic” elements to make it respectable enough for the Academy, but it’s also a showcase for a performance by an actor (that’d be Joaquin Phoenix) who’s long been acclaimed but so far hasn’t won an Academy Award (in other words, is “due”). But to that end, Phillips has concocted a uniquely awful type of awards-panderer where the pretentiousness crosses the line into hubris, matched by an incompetence that turns it from middling to rancid.

Instead of hitting the tropes Oscar voters like, the film opts to win praise by just copying movies critics already liked. The early 80s crime-ridden Gotham City merely evokes the hellish New York of Taxi Driver, but whole scenes are lifted from The King of Comedy (then taken to the obvious and bloody extreme for those who couldn’t grasp the effective subtlety of Martin Scorsese’s film). The aerial shots of Gotham cityscapes set to Hildur Guðnadóttir’s (good) score recall the urban realism and Hans Zimmer compositions of Christopher Nolan’s far superior Dark Knight trilogy. And as Phoenix's disaffected Arthur Fleck descends from party clown and wannabe standup comic into homicidal maniac, the narrative leaves no mentally ill villain trope unturned, and the ones meant to be twists or shocking are obvious from the outset.

Phoenix, to his credit, acts. In one of the very few original touches that works, this Joker is given an affectation that causes uncontrollable laughter regardless of the situation. In scenes where this plays a part, he’s so believable it’s painful. But like nearly every other idea, original or ripped-off, this only comes up sporadically at convenient points in the plot. In-between, Phoenix is merely elevating every movie bad guy stereotype of mental illness, from hallucinatory schizophrenics (or at least the misunderstood conditions movies file under “schizophrenia”) to internal-monologuing lone wolves. Despite only having a problematic Hollywood understanding of mental illness, the tone suggests the filmmakers truly believe they're providing a genuine and accurate portrait of it (albeit, tucked inside a supervillain origin story, however distanced from its comic book roots it may be). It’s totally uninformed, often insensitive, and when it's not unpleasant, it's just tedious. 

Joker is a movie that takes itself so seriously but doesn’t know what it’s talking about. Its attempts to say something about the times we live in—the film features a mass protest movement like Occupy with clown masks instead of Guy Fawkes, and a Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen) who’s vaguely Trump-like—are a mishmash of right and left that not so much seeks some milquetoast middle ground as betrays a lack of understanding of current events (a problem shared by War Dogs, Phillips’ last semiserious attempt to go topical). It mistakes surface level mention of issues and ideas as depth, ugliness as realism, and misery as compelling drama. And the final nail in the coffin: the attempts at dark comedy land with a thud.

IT Chapter Two

The first chapter of director Andy Muschietti’s IT adaptation was an entertaining funhouse-style horror film—on the first watch. In subsequent viewings, the scares quickly lose their bite. That, combined with the fact that it gave us a good look at the monster (that’d be Bill Skarsgård’s evil clown Pennywise), would seem to suggest that the terrors would be exhausted for IT Chapter Two. Remarkably, though, the second part is the better, scarier, and more fun of the two.

It’s still the jump scare, haunted funhouse type of horror, not the terrifying, won’t-sleep-for-days kind (for that, I don’t think any filmmaker could possibly match Stephen King’s prose). But, it’s pretty darn effective, with some terrific horror set pieces, tension-filled chases, and a variety of monsters more numerous and disturbing than the film’s predecessor (this the grown-up half of IT, after all). And wisely, Skarsgård’s Pennywise (who, let’s be honest, always came off more like a goofball emcee than a truly terrifying foil) is kept to a relative minimum, lest he undercut the scares. The only time that happens is when the movie does so by design through injecting some macabre humor, to great effect.

As the first IT adapted the childhood parts of King’s novel, this one follows the Losers’ Club as adults (played by James McAvoy, Jessica Chastain, Bill Hader, Jay Ryan, James Ransone, Isaiah Mustafa, and, briefly, Andy Bean), with flashbacks to the time period of the first film. Set in roughly the present day, the pack has gone their separate ways, though their personal issues haven’t left them, only taken new forms. But when the evil force they battled 27 years earlier returns to the town of Derry, Maine, the group reunites to destroy it, and in doing so each confront their personal childhood trauma.

Besides the horror, Chapter Two attempts to crack the character drama that King spent literally hundreds of pages on in the book. Admittedly, the cast is pretty excellent, conveying real emotions besides fear. Hader and Ransone are particularly great at providing gallows humor that’s hilarious but also clearly a coping mechanism. Ultimately, though, there mostly just isn’t enough time, even in a runtime on the long side, to explore these elements beyond the surface level, as mere plot devices or setups for scary sequences.

This doesn’t necessarily hurt the movie as a horror flick. But there are a few pretty harrowing depictions of real traumatic stuff (abuse, homophobia, hate crimes). And the narrative does absolutely nothing with these, leaving them just sort of floating like unceremoniously abandoned subplots. These aren’t bad or exploitative scenes in and of themselves—in fact, one of them is one of the stronger and more unsettling sequences in the whole two-film arc—but leaving them in without expanding upon them or tying them into the main plotline at all can’t help but make them feel a bit gratuitous.

That aside, the only glaring complaint is that the two-film structure tilts very unevenly in the second’s favor. Scenes that are strong in Chapter Two perhaps could have been even scarier placed earlier in the whole narrative, or helped play up the mystery of the story. Since Chapter Two ends up frequently employing flashbacks, it seems a bit like a mistake to divide the novel into two films by era, instead of just doing a two-parter while still employing King’s original back-and forth plotting. Which I guess is a roundabout and backhanded way of saying the IT film cycle is one of the few horror series to get better and scarier with its second entry.

Deadwood: The Movie

Debuting in 2004 during the initial boom of prestige TV series, HBO’s Deadwood arguably was and still may be the best program of the so-called “Golden Age of Television” since the turn of the millennium. Over three seasons, the show presented a bleak, rough, intensely vulgar view of history and society, but one that was also beautiful and full of arresting characters. Then, just as civilization seemed to be reaching the show’s namesake goldmining town, it was cancelled before it had the chance to reach its planned conclusion.

Now, after years of rumors and false starts, the HBO version of Deadwood lives again, at least for just under two hours. And things have changed since last we visited. The town is now part of the new U.S. state of South Dakota and looks positively modern by the standards of 1889. The residents we came to know over the show’s run are grizzled and grey. Obscenities still pepper their ornate dialogue, but it seems a little less potent (whether this is a stylistic touch to reflect the town becoming more civilized or just because the envelope for explicit content has been pushed ever further since the show ended, I’m not sure).

Being a single telefilm, some limits that don’t befall a season of a series do apply here. For instance, on Deadwood the show, nearly every speaking role had depth, even if they only appeared in a few or even a single episode. The show's town of Deadwood was not just the canvas for the story of the lead characters, but a fully populated, living community. Well, there’s little time for that in the film, and clock constraints also reduce some rich, beloved main and supporting players to little more than cameos. Also, the structure where each episode comprises a single day in the town is abandoned, though the action is more confined than a general nebulous timeframe commonly used in film.

In fact, the first 40 minutes or so comprise a single day, and it’s here the movie feels most like its series counterpart. True, it mostly consists of the residents walking around town and catching up with one another (thus letting the viewers also catch up), and a few flashbacks to moments from the show for those who don’t remember the exact plot details (which might be superfluous to those who rewatched the series ahead of this movie, myself included). But, there is a joy at simply spending time with these characters again, even if it doesn’t feel quite the same as before. This portion also inventively contains several reflections of the terrific first episode of the show, some obvious, some possibly coincidental. It’s definitely fan service, but it’s fan service done right.

After that nostalgic opening act, conflict rears its head (I won’t go into details, just say that Gerald McRaney’s evil robber baron George Hearst, now a U.S. Senator, is back in town). Despite the shortened runtime, though, said conflict still moves at a similar pace to a season of the show. Thus, there isn’t near enough time for it to reach a boiling point. Moreover, the narrative ultimately doesn’t seem terribly interested in it. Just when things start to get brewing, the film instead shifts to saying its goodbyes, letting the conflict all but fizzle out.

So, too, does any sense of plotting or structure, all the more apparent in the coda to a series that was so expertly plotted and sterlingly written and rewritten to perfection. On the other hand, as the movie melancholily ambulates toward an endpoint, there are moments with characters who do get screen time which still display some of that fantastic writing.

Among the cast, the standout is Timothy Olyphant as now-U.S. Marshal Seth Bullock. A little more mellowed and polished than before (perhaps a bit of Raylan Givens rubbed off from Olyphant's time on Justified), he nonetheless is as righteous and swift to dispense justice as ever. Often, the show seemed to relegate him to secondary lead behind costar Ian McShane, but here, he’s the lynchpin, and riveting as can be. By contrast, McShane’s saloonkeeper Al Swearengen is quieter, withered, and much scarcer than before, no longer the force in town he once was (but still one onscreen). This is the most affecting part of the picture, all the more so because one can see the real-life parallels with Deadwood creator David Milch. And the most uplifting story is that of Joanie Stubbs (Kim Dickens) and Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert), especially turns the latter’s arc takes.

Deadwood: The Movie doesn’t provide a ton of closure, and does not continue many specific plotlines or tighten any loose ends from the series. Frankly, the show’s final episode—a bit abrupt and so downbeat, but conclusive and thematically fitting—is a better ending. The film is more like an overdue funeral and memorial service for the show. It’s sad at times, and laments the fact that it never got to do everything it wanted, but also happy and celebratory, and mindful of why the show was so good and beloved.

Avengers: Endgame

While they’ve had no shortage of spectacle (and as of this movie, that hasn’t changed), the heart of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is its characters: the sarcastic smugness of Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man, the pure-hearted resolve of Chris Evans’ Captain America, the lovable dimwitted arrogance of Chris Hemsworth’s Thor, the oddball chemistry of the Guardians of the Galaxy, and the essential work of the heroes without their own solo movies, as well as the unsung supporting players who’ve come along for the ride. Even in the lower-stakes MCU entries, the viewer knows they’re in for a good time on account of the repartee between these familiar faces.

Low-stakes, Avengers: Endgame certainly is not. It’s the biggest superhero picture so far, in runtime and sheer massiveness of its cast of characters, and could very well finish its run in theaters as the biggest film ever. And of course, we all saw what happened at the end of Infinity War.

But, it finds the survivors of Thanos' (Josh Brolin) universal genocide far from spoiling for a fight. Instead, the movie takes its time—nearly the whole first of its three hours—to let the audience mourn with the characters. These scenes cut like a knife. You can’t spend 11 years and twice as many movies with these people and not feel their loss. It’s moments like these that show why comic book characters and stories can mean so much to fans.

Act two sees the remaining heroes attempt a complicated time travel plot to fix the events of the previous movie, and the film turns into a bit of a Back to the Future Part II-esque jumble. Not only is its treatment of timeline-altering left rather muddled and inadequately explained or resolved, but it also turns a bit into a cameo-fest, like one of those cheesy final seasons of a TV show where every supporting character drops in to say goodbye. Although, to the picture’s credit, most of it feels organic, not forced, and it also mines these sequences for some great gags and emotional character moments.

And really, what are some minor plot point inconsistencies in the face of so many terrific character moments? Oh, and the biggest superhero battle ever. It's a fool's errand to doubt Marvel at this point, but it would seem a monumental task to surpass the gigantic crossover finale of Infinity War just a year ago. Yet top it they do. Fights both one-on-one and on a giant scale are eye-poppingly thrilling, every hero big and small gets at least one moment in the spotlight, and it’s packed to the gills with turns that will elicit cheers and tears, sometimes both at once.

As a superhero team-up event, Endgame more than satisfies. As the conclusion to a yearlong cliffhanger, it sticks the landing and then some. As the exclamation point on the last decade-point-one of Marvel movies and the superhero genre they’ve changed, it hits it out of the park. But it’s the character moments that touch the most, and many of them are unlikely to leave dry eyes. On that level, this is probably the best superhero movie ever made.

Captain Marvel

Captain Marvel could have simply been an average Marvel movie—an appetizer for Avengers: Endgame—and that would have been enough. But instead, it has some fun tweaking the Marvel formula in inventive ways. The result is easily the best standalone film of the MCU’s third phase (which began after Age of Ultron).

The biggest changeup is the structure, which reveals story pieces out of chronological order. Rather than a stale straight origin story, the film instead presents its narrative as a bit of puzzle. This makes for a captivating introduction to this corner of the Marvel universe for casual viewers, and for those well-versed in the comics lore, it still is an entertaining trip with a few genuine surprises.

All I’ll say is that Brie Larson plays the title character, a galactic warrior fighting on the side of the Kree (the blue-skinned aliens we saw in Guardians of the Galaxy). In the midst of a conflict with the shapeshifting Skrulls, she ends up on Earth in the mid-1990s. Teaming with a young(er) S.H.I.E.L.D. agent named Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), she races against the Skrull Talos (Ben Mendelsohn) to find an experimental piece of space flight technology designed by a U.S. Air Force scientist (Annette Bening).

Mendelsohn chews the scenery exquisitely, and his recent persona as the go-to bad guy for nerd blockbusters cleverly plays into the plot. Other franchise newcomers like Jude Law and Lashana Lynch are effective in supporting roles, as are a few returning faces (most obviously the digitally de-aged Jackson, who is a characteristic hoot as the greener, less battle-hardened Fury). But this is Larson’s show, no doubt. She carries every moment she’s onscreen as expertly as any of the Marvel heroes who have been doing this since Phase One, showing icy resolve, disarming sincerity, and an expert handle on the patented Marvel humor, often all within the same scene. And yeah, she gets a few girl power lines in to rebuke those who were piling on this movie before it even came out.

There are some exciting action sequences in this one, but the most enjoyable element is how it uses its humor. The 90s references are numerous and hilarious (and I'm definitely biased, but the era-appropriate soundtrack plays a hell of a lot better that the boomer rock of Guardians). Certain blanks in the franchise continuity are filled in in uproariously funny ways. It even seeps into the action, namely a shapeshifting fistfight/car chase involving a commuter train that’s alternately side-splitting and actually pretty good. Though not as explicitly parodic or fourth wall-breaking as Deadpool, this is arguably the most self-aware Marvel film, and more fun for that (and if you thought the last cameo by the late Stan Lee couldn’t be topped…). But, it never gets too carried away with itself, and stays grounded enough that there’s still some pathos to the proceedings.

After Infinity War, rumors are flying about the ultimate fate of characters in Endgame, but everyone seems to agree that it will be the end of the road for at least some of the Phase One players. If Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel is given the task of carrying on the Marvel mantle, I’d say the franchise is in good hands.