[9.5/10] They got me. They really did. I believed that Saul would do it, that he would find a way to lie, cheat, and steal out of suffering any real consequences for all the pain and losses he is responsible for. I believed that he would trade in Kim's freedom and chance to make a clean break after baring her soul in exchange for a damn pint of ice cream. I have long clocked Better Call Saul as a tragedy, about a man who could have been good, and yet, through both circumstance and choice, lists inexorably toward becoming a terrible, arguably evil person. I thought this would be the final thud of his descent, selling out the one person on this Earth who loved him to feather his own nest.
Maybe Walt was right when he said that Jimmy was "always like this." Maybe Chuck was right that there something inherently corrupt and untrustworthy in the heart of his little brother. This post-Breaking Bad epilogue has been an object lesson in the depths to which Gene Takovic will stoop in order to feed his addiction and get what he wants. There would be no greater affirmation of the completeness of his craven selfishness and cruelty than throwing Kim under the bus to save himself.
Only, in the end, that's the feint, that's the trick, that's the con, on the feds and the audience. When Saul hears that Kim took his words to heart and turned herself in, facing the punishments that come with it, he can't sit idly by and profit from his own lies and bullshit. He doesn't want to sell her out; he wants to fall on the sword in front of her, make sure she knows that he knows what he did wrong.Despite his earlier protestations that his only regret was not making more money or avoiding knee damage, he wants to confess in a court of law that he regrets the choices that led him here and the pain he caused, and most of all he regrets that they led to losing her.
In that final act of showmanship and grace, he lives up to the advice Chuck gives him in the flashback scene here, that if he doesn't like the road that his bad choices have led him, there's no shame in taking a different path. Much as Walt did, at the end of the line, Saul admits his genuine motives, he accepts responsibility for his choices after years of blame and evasion. Most of all, he takes his name back, a conscious return to being the person that Kim once knew, in form and substance. It is late, very late, when it happens, but after so much, Jimmy uses his incredible skills to accept his consequences, rather than sidestep them, and he finds the better path that Kim always believed he could walk, one that she motivates him to tread.
It is a wonderful finale to this all-time great show. I had long believed that this series was a tragedy. It had to be, given where Jimmy started and where the audience knew Saul ended. But as it was always so good at doing, Better Call Saul surprised me, with a measured bit of earned redemption for its protagonist, and moving suggestion that with someone we care for and who cares of us, even the worst of us can become someone and something better. In its final episode, the series offered one more transformation -- from a tale of tragedy, to a story of hope.
(On a personal note, I just want to say thank you to everyone who read and commented on my reviews here over the years. There is truly no show that's been as rewarding for me to write about than Better Call Saul, and so much of that owes to the community of people who offered me the time and consideration to share my thoughts, offered their kind words, and helped me look at the series in new ways with their thoughtful comments. I don't know what the future holds, but I am so grateful to have been so fortunate as to share this time and these words with you.)
EDIT: One last time, here is my usual, extended review of the finale in case anyone's interested -- https://thespool.net/reviews/better-call-saul-series-finale-recap-saul-gone/
If this film is a cake, then it’s got the best possible frosting you could wish for. The cake itself, however, isn’t great.
I’ve always had a strange relationship with these films. I don’t really care for the Raimi films (I think they’re overly cheesy, poorly acted and dated, though don’t expect anyone from around my age to admit that), the Webb films are fine (really like the first one, second one’s a mess) and I’ve really liked the 2 recent ones (not as much as Into the Spiderverse, but still good in their own right).
Compared to the previous 2, this one pretty much ditches the John Hughes aesthetic as it goes along, and it goes into full on, operatic superhero mode.
Unfortunately, it is another one of those project that puts nostalgia and fan pandering over story and character, the kind of blockbuster we’re seeing over and over again in a post Force Awakens world.
This story is completely hacked together, consisting of so many contrivances, conveniences and established characters acting out of character that it becomes a bit of a shitshow ( Doctor Strange, a genius, is being tricked by teenagers; Peter not knowing about the consequences of the spell is a very forced way to set the plot in motion; Ned being able to open portals is quite ridiculous when the Doctor Strange movie made a point about how hard that is to learn; why is Venom in the universe given how they set up the rules of the multiverse, and the list goes on ). The problem is that they needed to take that bullet in order to make the film they wanted to make here (or rather, the film fans wanted to see), but that doesn’t make it the right choice by any means, because it leads to a nonsensical film with a rushed pace.
Look, you can nitpick this film to death ( why would a university publicly admit that MJ and Ned are rejected because of their connection to Peter? ), but that’s not even my point. It’s heightened and not meant to be taken that seriously, I get that, but you at least need some form of internal logic, you cannot just do these unearned things because the plot demands it.
It’s not all bad though, Holland’s Spider-man still has a very good arc with some great emotional beats in it, and they make some very bold choices towards the end that I hope they stick with. It’s very similar to the first Fantastic Beasts, so I hope they don’t pull a Crimes of Grindelwald by retconning everything .
The acting is great, Holland and Zendaya give their best and most mature performances yet, and the villains are all good. I really like that they toned Dafoe down a little bit.
It looks fine. It has some of the best cinematography out of the trilogy, but some of the action looks very animated (again, stop touching up the suit, just let it wrinkle ffs) and unfinished, which is probably because this thing was rushed out, as we know.
For instance, there are some really wonky shots in the scene where Spider-Man fights Doctor Strange, the close-ups with Benedict Cumberbatch look like a weather forecast on television.
The references to the previous incarnations are a bit of a mixed bag. I like that they progressed some stuff and did interesting things with the things they referenced ( for example, you really feel like time has passed with Tobey and Andrew, they’re not giving a copy of their original performances, which is also a great excuse to tone down the awkwardness and lack of personality in Tobey’s version. Also, the banter between them is very nice, of course ), but most of it plays like a pandering greatest hits compilation. I don't need Dafoe to say you know, I'm something of a scientist myself again, it is nothing but a cheap attempt to trigger my nostalgia button.
Finally, it also has some of the worst tonal balance and comedy out of the trilogy, especially with some of the lines that are given to Benedict Cumberbatch.
5/10
In summary/TLDR: great idea for Sony’s bank account, but the seeds for this needed to be planted much earlier in order to make it a good film.
[8.4/10] I'd speculated about how Kim would depart Jimmy's world. I feared she might be killed. I thought she'd get fed up with his misdeeds and leave him over that. What I didn't expect was that it would be spurred by a moment of self-recognition born of a terrible tragedy. Kim still loves Jimmy, but she recognizes that they're "poison" together, that they get off on the joint cons, and that when they do, people get hurt. She is one of the vanishingly small number of people in this franchise to recognize that she's on a destructive path and take drastic action to stop it. It's one of the most unexpected, but ultimately satisfying ways to have her exit I can imagine.
And it puts her in good company. Jimmy is as horrified by what happened as Kim is, but he can envision moving on, he can picture maintaining this life despite where it led them, he can see forgetting this some day. Kim can't. It's the same way Gus cannot forget his former partner Max, someone he loves, whose memory lingers with him when he gazes into Don Eladio's pool and holds him back from continuing to flirt with the handsome waiter who chats him up over a glass of a wine. It's the same way Mike cannot forget his son, which leads him to tell Nacho's father the truth about what happened to his child.
Mr. Varga shrugs off Mike's promise that justice will be done, recognizing that what he's talking about is vengeance. He declares that vengeance is a cycle that doesn't stop, and we know from Breaking Bad that he's right. Gus hasn't beaten the Salamancas or Don Eladio. Mike hasn't completed his tour of duty so that he can retire and spend time with his granddaughter. Jimmy can't avoid crossing paths with the cartel again. They're all in this now, and their victories bring them no peace, only pull them deeper into the muck of this, and closer to their ignoble ends.
But Kim breaks away. She cannot forget, but she can act to stop this from happening again. Her final scene with Jimmy (for now at least) is more quietly heartbreaking than explosive and dramatic, but that suits the gravity of this. And in her absence, Jimmy is free to become Saul, as an indeterminate time jump to the man in his huckster faux-finery confirms. The last thing holding Jimmy back is gone. Saul Goodman is here. He can't stop. And despite the woman in his bed, the bedraggled secretary on his phone, and the crowd of people in his waiting room, he is alone.
EDIT: If you'd like to read my usual, longer review, you can find it here -- https://thespool.net/reviews/tv-recap-better-call-saul-season-6-episode-9/
[8.6/10] It’s a fool’s errand to wish for happy endings in the world of Better Call Saul. But I had a faint hope for Nacho. I pictured him getting out somehow. I envisioned him finally escaping from the life that he fell too deeply into and starting again. I imagined Jesse Pinkman arriving in Alaska and making a connection with Ignacio Varga under an assumed name, Mike’s two surrogate sons coming together and looking after one another the way he might have done himself. It’s a nice thought, one too nice for the consequences this universe tends to have in store for its major players.
Instead, Nacho is dead. And we are left to take comfort in the few saving graces of his unfortunate demise. He went out his way, choosing his own “good death” rather than being the plaything of other people’s wills like he’s been for so much of the series. He did so to guarantee the safety of his father, with whom he shared a pained final phone call, freighted with meaning. He claimed one final measure of control, of destiny, to make his death worth something, to him and the people he cared about.
These are small blessings and small comforts. I teared up at the fateful moment when Nacho takes his own life rather than subject himself to the plans of the drug lords around him. Because this is a tragedy. Because this went south just as Nacho’s father said it would. Because Nacho thought he could beat it, avoid the pitfalls, and instead was sucked down by the inevitable gravity of this life. Because despite his best efforts, Mike Ehrmantraut lost another son.
These are not showy, emotional men. So their tiniest expressions speak volumes. The scrunch of Mike’s mouth when he knows Nacho’s gone that reveals his pain and disgust with this whole thing. The slightly raised eyebrows of Gus Fring that show his quiet terror that, with one word, Nacho could blow this whole thing up. And the almost imperceptible nod shared by Nacho and Mike, an acknowledgment of deeds that say more than any words either man has. This is a grim, even sentimental experience for all, made that much more forceful by how Better Call Saul underplays it.
God help me, Michael Mando deserves an Emmy for this episode alone. He, like so much of this incredibly talented cast, has deserved recognition for a long time now. But this is a masterclass. The sheer physicality he puts on display when Nacho buries himself in the sludge of an old tanker truck, the unspoken well of pain and regret pouring out of him when he hears his father’s voice one last time, the sheer vitriol on display when he curses the Salamancas and declares himself the author of all their pain. The shades of desperation, resignation, and self-immolation Mando communicates are virtuosic to the last. If this is truly his final performance on the show, he goes out with his masterpiece.
But it’s not all Nacho in this episode. We get more advancement in Kim and Jimmy’s plan to undermine Howard. This is one of their smaller efforts, but there’s a sufficient amount of tension in Huell(!) and a keymaker using their combined skills to duplicate Howard’s car keys before his valet can catch wise. One of this show’s great skills is taking fairly mundane parts of these scams and ratcheting up the tension. The interplay between a teenage valet rushing back to a parking garage, cut with the grooves of the key and the stairwells of the building, set to a classical soundtrack, makes a comparatively straightforward part of this plan seem like a big deal.
But after such chicanery, Huell asks Saul a simple but telling question -- why do you do this? The dialogue implies that Huell needs the funds, that this is one of few options for him. Jimmy, on the other hand, is a lawyer. His wife is a lawyer. They could get by without this. Jimmy claims that Huell doesn’t understand, that this is for the greater good, that even if the tactics are underhanded, the desired result is good, which makes taking these risks worthwhile.
And yet, Kim and Jimmy seem to revel in the chase. There’s something personal in this for both of them. The thrill of it seems to light both of their fires. All of it suggests their motives for continuing with something that, to Huell’s implicit point, they don’t have to pursue, may not be as altruistic as Saul pretends. More to the point, they have more to lose in all this than either one of them seems ready to acknowledge.
There’s a lifeline though. One of the prosecutors, Suzanne Ericsen, who once called Jimmy a scumbag, offers to let him turn state’s evidence. She pieces together not only the real deal with Lalo, but how Jimmy didn’t want to be the cartel’s lawyer. After Kim turns over some incriminating evidence she’d be better off suppressing in the name of fairness, Suzanne shares this offer with her, with the idea that he might listen to her in a way he wouldn’t listen to Suzanne.
Suzanne frames it as an opportunity to do what’s right after being steeped in something dirty. Kim frames it as a choice between being a “friend of the cartel” or a rat. But neither of them seems to fully countenance it in the way the viewers, who can process it in the context of the show as a whole, can. It’s a chance for Jimmy to do what Nacho didn’t -- to get out of this, to step away before it’s too late.
It’s too late for Nacho. He tries valiantly to avoid the worst of the blowback. His descent into the muck to avoid his killers is as symbolic as it is terrifying. His kindness (and cash) for a friendly mechanic who offers him help when he needs it and asks for nothing in return shows the decency within a troubled and ultimately doomed young man. His grief, not just at never being able to see his father again, but at confirming Manuel Varga’s worst fears and predictions about his son, is palpable.
There is something admirable in Nacho in his final days, when he accepts the inevitability of his end. He cannot change that. He’s made too many bad choices to reach this point. But he can use his life, the value it still has, to protect the person he cares about most.
The sharpest thing Nacho does is leverage the value of whether he’ll tell the Salamancas the truth, or whether he’ll play along. He realizes the rare power he holds over Gus, rather than the other way around. He doesn’t use it for comfort or to try to buy his own way out. He just wants to protect his dad and uses the last thing he has of value to do it.
It wouldn’t work, though, without his similarly paternal bond with Mike. For all his “Not my call” talk with Nacho, Mike is a man of honor. The only way a promise from a snake like Gus means anything to Ignacio is that it comes backed by Mike.
There’s a rapport between the two of them, an understanding, a familial intimacy that adds the wholesomeness and tragedy of it all. Mike insists on being the one to rough Nacho up to look the part of someone working against Gus’ operation rather than for it. Beforehand, they share that drink together, an acknowledgment or respect and care. And Mike puts himself out there to be an “insurance policy” for the plan, there to ensure, in his heart of hearts, that it goes down the way they planned it, that Nacho doesn’t have to suffer. He looks through the scope in the way he did back in season 2’s “Klick”, and sees someone who understands the lengths a father and son will go to in order to protect one another as well as he does.
Except, when the time comes, Nacho goes off script. He palmed a piece of glass, presumably from the cup Gus broke an episode ago, and uses it when the time’s right. Rather than simply announcing, as Fring insisted, that he was in league with Alvarez and paid off by rivals in Peru to sabotage the Salamancas, he goes a step further.
He laughs at the prospect of “the chicken man” being involved as a joke. He swears his hatred of the whole Salamanca family, offering up the motive for him to do this without any need for being aligned with Gus. He takes credit for Hector’s sugar pills, pointing to Gus’ intervention as the only reason Hector is still alive. In brief, he makes the story better and more plausible than even Gus had in mind. It’s clever, proving his worth even in his final moments, giving Fring everything he could possibly want to throw the heat off of him, in the hopes that it will convince the crime lord to keep his word and spare his father. After so long, so many missteps, Nacho seized control and went out on his own terms, if only a little.
The palmed glass becomes vital to slipping through the zip ties that bind him. He seizes Don Bolsa’s gun and holds it to the man’s head, so everyone can point their guns at him. And then, with the weapon in hand, he can kill himself, rather than subject him to the Salamancas’ torture or other humiliating or excrutiating ways to leave his world. His death is still a sad, terrible, regrettable thing, but it comes with a moment of self-actualization, where for a moment at least, Nacho is not the pawn of these men. He is their equal. And then he is gone.
Another life wasted. Another existence snuffed out in the middle of the desert. Another son lost amid the plata y plomo. In a beautiful opening sequence, we see the flora growing over the spot where Nacho died, growth perhaps fueled by his remains. Amid such desolation grows a beautiful azure flower, the rain come to wash it all away. There, catching its droplets, is that same shard of glass, the one that gave Nacho his last bit of freedom, before the collective weight of these larger forces could firmly and finally take it away.
It would be too much to call Nacho a good person. At his best, he was still a drug dealer thriving on others’ addiction and misery. He may have been a touch nobler, a touch younger and thus more excusable, than the psychos he worked for. But he was still a bad guy doing bad things.
And yet, there was something recognizable in his fall and folly. Too many of us see shorter, yet more dangerous paths to the things we want, and believe we can avoid their greatest perils along the way to our hope for spoils. We see Nacho’s regret, his emptiness, his sense of being trapped in this before he realized how deeply he had fallen. We see how his desire to protect his dad -- from Hector, from Gus, from his own mistakes -- led him to this point, where he was in too deep with no good options.
Nacho may not have been perfect, but he was pitiable; he was recognizable; he was loved. There is always tragedy in the death of someone loved. Jimmy is also loved. He has his chance to get out, to turn to the police like Nacho’s father instructed his son.
But Ignacio didn’t listen. He’ll never have a chance to escape. He won’t ever meet Jesse in Alaska. Exit ramps are rare. Happy endings are in short supply in this world. And in the end, there weren’t enough of either left for Manuel Varga’s little boy.
[8.3/10] I kept waiting for it all to go wrong somehow. Things don’t simply “work out” in the world of Better Call Saul. This show is a tragedy, after all. People succeed, but only at a cost. There’s always some unexpected wrinkle, some unforeseen consequence, that makes victory more complicated and bittersweet than anyone on either side of the screen imagined.
Time and again, season 6 presented the plans of Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk) and Kim(Rhea Seehorn) as nearly falling into ruin. If Howard (Patrick Fabian) spots his erstwhile foe in the country club locker room, if a valet walks a step quicker, if Jimmy can’t summon the strength to move a parking sign, the whole scheme falls apart. With each step, they were this close to being discovered. Every time they flirted with disaster. Surely their luck couldn’t last forever.
For its part, “Plan and Execution”, the midseason finale, gives the two of them one last hurdle to leap over. As established in the previous episode, the Sandpiper mediator unexpectedly wears a cast, screwing up their whole plan to stage photos where it looks like he’s taking a bribe from Saul. Now, Kim and Jimmy have to scramble to reassemble their team and restage the pictures, with the ticking clock of the impending mediation to add to the pressure.
By god, it’s fun! If you step back and look at Kim and Jimmy’s trickery, it’s easy to see how they’re destroying someone’s life for thin reasons. However much Howard may deserve some comeuppance for his own misdeeds, this is, at a minimum, disproportionate retribution. But competence in stories is thrilling and competence with flair is captivating. What Jimmy and Kim do isn’t good; but good lord are they good at what they do.
Jimmy persuades his actor to do the job via a stirring speech about the love of performance. His director parlays the “emergency” into more cash in a canny fashion. His make-up artist is dressed up like a Gelfling but no less dedicated to her craft. His boom operator rushes to the scene with the proper equipment in tow. Kim herself fashions a makeshift cast (who would know better?) and races, shoeless, to adjust the blocking for the “scene.” These are pros working their magic in a crunch, and the delight of seeing them work is only matched by the underhandedness of their deeds.
The pièce de résistance comes when the episodes reveals that Howard’s private eye is in on the deal. The ploy of switching the phone number for Howard’s usual detectives is a little convenient. But it adds one more flourish to the scheme: a chance for the P.I. to seed the misleading photos, for Kim and Jimmy to lace them with the drug that will mess with Howard’s head (and, importantly, his eyes), and have their inside man switch them out with some phonies to make Hamlin look like a clown.
It’s the perfect crime. And the last minute change in plans, forcing our would-be heroes to scramble to overcome one more monkey wrench thrown into the proceedings, only shows how brilliant they are at this sort of thing.
So something else has to go wrong, right? Maybe the AV kids realize something’s amiss and decide to call the cops. Maybe poor Irene, the class representative who Jimmy originally recruited, comes into contact with the chemical agent intended for Howard and faints in the middle of the mediation. There have to be complications, unforeseen problems, something to show that for all their skill, all their talent, Kim and Jimmy are flying too close to the sun here.
There aren’t, though. The plan goes off without a hitch. Howard becomes unhinged the second he sees the mediator and makes the connection to the bribe photos. He rants to all involved about how Saul clearly set him up. His pupils are dilated as he cuts the image of someone unwell. He raves like a madman, sounding paranoid, delusional, yelling at strangers about a conspiracy whose only proof is pictures of Jimmy returning some jogger’s frisbee. This is it. This is Jimmy and Kim’s con artist masterpiece.
The mediator walks. The other side lowers their offer, smelling blood in the water. And Clifford Main (Ed Begley Jr.) has no choice but to blink. Maybe he believes Howard. Maybe he can envision a world where his longtime colleague is telling the truth, and the former employee who once bilked his firm out of a signing bonus is devilish enough to orchestrate all of this.
But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. Because Jimmy and Kim want their money and their revenge. Howard wants to do anything to prevent Saul from winning. But Cliff, the most decent man in this universe, only wants to do what’s best for their clients. That means salvaging what he can from this disaster, avoiding the shaky uncertainties that lie ahead, and taking the offer.
It worked, by god. Kim and Jimmy’s plan worked and worked perfectly. It may have cost Kim her chance to supercharge the pro bono practice that supposedly motivated all of this, but at the end of the day, their plan went off without a hitch. As Kim’s mother might say, they got away with it.
The same can’t be said for Lalo (Tony Dalton). He’s had preternatural success to this point. The cunning drug lord tracked down Margarethe Ziegler. He found one of Werner’s “boys.” He uncovered the location of Gus’ (Giancarlo Esposito) superlab. But to this point, he has no proof. “The Chicken Man” is too good at covering his tracks. Instead, all Lalo can muster is a video intended for Don Eladio, spelling out his theory, and a plan to murder Fring’s guards to secure the evidence he needs to support it. It’s a hard-fought plan, one born of sleeping in cars and lurking in the sewers until the time is right.
Except he slips up. He calls Hector (Mark Margolis), maybe to say goodbye in case things go wrong, maybe just to make his uncle proud before he dives into a dangerous situation. But Mike (Jonathan Banks) has tapped the nursing home’s phones, and now Fring’s men know Lalo’s back. The full court press surveillance worked. Unlike Saul’s scheme, Lalo’s plan ran aground on his opponent’s defenses.
The catch is that Lalo is as clever and resourceful as Jimmy and Kim are. Realizing he’s been foiled, he calls his uncle back and declares it’s time to go back to Plan A -- a thinly veiled threat on Gus’ life. He knows Mike will hear it, that Fring will respond, and that the security apparatus will shift. So much of the conflict between Lalo and Gus is a game of chess. Fring’s operation makes a move, and the Salamancas respond in kind. Lalo’s remaining moves are dwindling, but it’s not a checkmate just yet.
The game is done for Jimmy and Kim, though. They relax at home with a bottle of wine and an old movie. No more marks left to fool. No more schemes left to deploy. Only a bit of clean-up left. Howard shows up to congratulate and confront them, and they dutifully permit it. At this point, he cannot win. They’ve seen to that, and he knows it.
His earlier parable about Chuck’s habit with soft drink cans speaks to a sort of vigilance the elder McGill brother internalized. It’s the kind that presumably helped him fend off prankster younger siblings who’d shake up sodas to get one over on their big brothers, the sort that Howard sorely wishes he’d adopted. Hamlin can’t win anymore. But he can dress Jimmy and Kim down for their misdeeds, speak to the rot in the soul that would allow them to justify such an elaborate and immoral act, and try to make it harder to live with.
Howard isn’t wrong. The audience is inclined to side with Jimmy and Kim here. They are our protagonists. They work together and love one another. They’re damn fun to watch in every scheme and scam. They work meticulously to win the day and plan for every eventuality. As their own victim highlights, they rose from humble circumstances while Hamlin had a leg up from his father. Howard’s done crappy things to both of them. The couple is entitled to some righteous indignation.
What’s more, television shows are more fun when the main characters achieve what they set out to do. There’s a natural tendency to root for perspective characters, to hope they’ll see things through, even if deep down we know it’s wrong.
Nevertheless, Howard speaks the truth. Jimmy could have taken a different path, but he was born to color outside the lines. Kim is a person of incredible talent and potential, who uses those attributes to aid those who need it most and to wreak vengeance upon the people who’ve wronged her. They do get off on this, with their sultry celebration during the announcement of the settlement as the latest example. Hamlin has lost, but he diagnoses them to a tee. He draws into stark relief how they ruined a man’s life -- a man who has his own sins to answer for but is still struggling and sympathetic -- and how they’ll have no trouble sleeping at night.
Or at least they don’t betray one iota of regret. Howard points out that they have to play it that way, to feign ignorance and innocence. But they’re both consummate actors, unbothered by the routine, barely suggesting a whit of remorse for their actions. In their eyes, this is karma. This is reaping what you’ve sewn. This is a game to them.
Until it isn’t.
It’s just a wisp at first. A wick bends. The flame flickers. Something is coming. Writer-director Thomas Schnauz and his team deploy the suspense masterfully. The way the mood suddenly shifts is brilliant. Those subtle hints pile up, until the expressions on Kim and Jimmy’s faces tell the tale. They’re no longer gently asking Howard to leave because they’re done with him. They’re imploring him to go for his own safety. Lalo has arrived.
The twist is fabulous. Lalo’s call to Hector was not a means to smoke out Fring or lighten security at the superlab. He knew it would prompt Mike to circle the wagons and pull security away from tertiary targets like Saul, leaving him and Kim exposed and vulnerable. There’s more than one way to get to Gus and, backed into a corner, Lalo found another one.
It’s a spectacularly terrifying scene: the way he emerges from the shadows, the way he’s unnervingly calm despite his overwhelming menace, the way his “lawyers” desperately beg the man who was, just a minute ago, their worst enemy, to get out now if he wants to save himself.
Only It’s too late. The shock arrives as Lalo grows tired of waiting, of tolerating potential witnesses, and puts a bullet through a well-coiffed stranger’s skull once he’s fully diagnosed the shared pathology of his antagonizers. This is the worst day of Howard Hamlin’s life, and also the last day. Holy hell.
There it is. There is where things go wrong. There is the cost for taking things too far and tiptoeing too close to danger and disaster. Better Call Saul is a show that, commendably, zigs when viewers expect it to zag. It doesn’t traffic in twists for the sake of twists. The surprises are earned and the natural consequences of the characters’ actions, rooted in what will affect them most.
The recompense for so many risky ploys to sully a man’s career and reputation is not that the scheme ultimately falls apart or exposes Kim and Jimmy instead. It’s that it crashes into their earlier grand scheme, the source of their blood money, that quickly becomes that much bloodier. There is great surprise, rich irony, and dark poetry in that.
Six episodes remain of Better Call Saul, half a dozen more outings to firmly and finally resolve how what’s left of the life of Jimmy McGill runs headlong into the life of Saul Goodman. In the moment when the barriers between those two personas tumbles down for good, there lies a firm reminder. The “magic man”, whom viewers know and love from his entertaining skullduggery on Breaking Bad, arrived at that colorful existence from a soul-shaking path -- one that always comes with a trade-off, a complication, and a price
[8.5/10] Saul Goodman wants to bribe the Kettlemans. Kim Wexler wants to threaten them until they crack. Gus Fring wants to eliminate Nacho Varga by any means necessary, even if it means dragging Nacho’s father into this. Mike wants to spare Ignacio, and his dad, and will put his life on the line to do it. The goons the Salamancas enlist to take out Nacho shoot wildly at him. But the twins want to keep him alive.
Okay, they probably just want to torture him for information and then kill him. But the point stands. Once again, the goings on in the cartel half of the show seem utterly divorced from the goings on in the legal half of the show. But there’s a thematic resonance. Someone wants to show mercy, compassion, understanding. And someone else just wants to get the job done, whatever it takes.
Only it’s not who you’d expect in one half of the equation. For a long time, the dynamic between Jimmy and Kim was a simple one. Kim cared for Jimmy. She would look the other way at his schemes, sometimes enable them, sometimes even participate in them, but she would also play Jiminy Cricket when she felt he’d gone too far or hurt too many people. Kim possessed a moral compass that Jimmy seemed...less burdened by.
Now the roles are reversed. Jimmy is plenty active in the scheme to ruin Howard. He’s the one reigniting his acquaintance with the Kettlemans, dropping Clifford Main’s name as a hook, and baiting it with rumors of cocaine use from Hamlin that gives the couple hope of exoneration. Saul Goodman, even at this early stage, is no angel.
Except when push comes to shove, when the Kettlemans are onto their game and ready to blow up Saul and Kim’s plans by going straight to Howard, Saul wants to buy them off. Give them something for their troubles, and this might all go away. These are people after all -- bad people, people who defrauded a church -- but people nonetheless.
Kim doesn’t see it that way though. Mrs. Wexler sees two people up to their old tricks, defrauding elderly, indigenous people out of their tax money, who are standing in the way of bringing down someone even worse. She threatens them with an IRS investigation, then intimidates them with a promise to take away everything else they have. Kim Wexler is the stick, and her only regret is that Jimmy still gives them the money afterward.
Holy hell. What world are we living in where Saul Goodman is the angel on your shoulder and Kim Wexler is the devil? What’s so fascinating is that they’re both right. Deep down, Jimmy likes people. He doesn’t want to have to mess anyone up. He feels bad when folks get hurt, whether it’s his twin accomplices in the series’ first episode, or his elderly client, or even Clifford Main himself. Jimmy holds grudges sometimes against folks like Chuck or Howard, but he regrets when others get caught in the crossfire. There is something kind about that.
Kim has no sympathy for these people and quietly balks at Jimmy giving them the money when he doesn’t have to. But they don’t necessarily deserve sympathy. They ruined people's lives, stole from parishioners and pensioners, and have the gall to complain that they deserve their old lives back. She goes scorched earth with her righteous fury in a way Jimmy hesitates to, but her targets aren’t wrong exactly, at least for now.
The situation between Gus and Mike is different. They are navigating a situation that may or may not be more complicated, but certainly has the potential to be more deadly. One of the great treats of the Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul universe is watching the chess games played by various adversaries, with life and death stakes.
Fring’s men carefully stage and tamper with Nacho’s home to tip Don Bolsa off as to his location. (And the difference between Mike’s meticulous approach and Bolsa’s goons ransacking the place is striking.) Nacho sniffs out that someone is spying on him and finds a way to sneak out and gain just enough of an upper hand to escape the heat by the skin of his teeth. Gus himself has a faux-condolence meeting with Hector to keep up appearances, one brokered by Don Bolsa, and realizes with his Machiavellian intellect that Hector’s own conciliatory tone means Lalo’s still alive.
The whole thing shakes the normally unshakable mob boss. All of his best laid plans, all of his intricate designs to eliminate the Salamancas who are standing in his way, have run aground on two surprisingly resourceful men: Lalo and Nacho. He needs to kill the latter so that neither Lalo nor Don Eladio’s organization has any evidence that Gus was behind it all, even if it means holding Nacho’s father as a hostage to get him to come in from the cold.
Things don’t blow up in Gus’ face like this. His whole empire, his precision machine, could come crashing down thanks to the self-preserving machinations of one mole. Gus is, under normal circumstances, unspeakably steady. But here he inadvertently knocks a glass off the table which then shatters on the floor. For a regular person, it would be nothing. For someone as controlled as Gus, it’s practically a neon sign that he’s completely rattled, maybe even desperate, maybe willing to do something he might regret.
Mike Ehrmantraut, however, is there to hold the line. He stands at the other end of a gun -- pointed, loaded, and cocked -- willing to speak truth to power. Mike knows there’s another way. He doesn’t want to get an innocent man like Nacho’s father involved in this deadly game, pocketing the fake I.D. Nacho procured for his dad and stored in his safe so that the cartel doesn’t get any ideas. He doesn’t want a loyal kid like Nacho, a stand-in for his own son, to be the collateral damage in a game between bigger forces. He knows there’s another way, even if he was complicit in the scheme to tip off Nacho’s location to the Salamancas, and he has a place where he draws the line.
That tip leads to one of the most thrilling set pieces in Better Call Saul history. There’s a steady build to Nacho’s time holing up in a crappy motel. We feel his cabin fever and Rear Window-esque paranoia when waiting out his supposed ride out of here. We sense the heat in the room, the aura of being watched from afar, the panic that each shadow cast upon his window could mean death. Before “Carrot and Stick” goes to a full blown fire, it lets the ominous mood smolder long enough to put the audience in Nacho’s shoes.
Then, he has his fears confirmed and spots eyes watching him from across the way. His confrontation with the man hired to spy on him is an incredible, tense scene. Nacho is frightened, but smart, taking the right precautions, asking the right questions, and performing a natural experiment when he doesn’t get answers he can trust. His move to call his handler in Fring’s organization, highlight himself as a flight risk, and then see his watcher’s phone light up is a clever way to identify who’s stalking him and, more to the point, who he can no longer trust. There too, the tension ratchets up, but it’s taut and restrained.
So when it finds release, in a bombastic shoot-out featuring The Cousins, there’s this combined sense of terror and catharsis. Nacho gets just enough lead time to give himself a fighting chance, despite the bullet flying like angry hornets through the desert sky. His frantic hotwiring attempts, his gunfight with one unlucky mook, his Matrix-esque vehicular standoff with the twins, all keep the heart pumping and the mood desperate. It’s rare that Better Call Saul goes for straight action, but it pulls it off as well as any show on television.
It also pulls off characters thinking, those quiet spaces and well-constructed shots that let you know exactly what they’re mulling even when they don’t say a word, as well as any other series. Nacho never vocalizes that he suspects his handlers have turned on him, but you can see the way he turns over the possibilities in his mind with nothing to do but consider them. Kim never says that she doesn't trust Jimmy to close the deal with the Kettlemans if he refuses to try the hard way, she just pauses for a moment when he says the carrot will work for them, and then adds an innocuous “I’ll come with.” Gus never expresses how worried he is about all of this mess, he just looks off, letting the audience fill the gap. And he’s match cut with Clifford Main, who never says he’s beginning to buy the story about Howard’s drug use, but whose ten thousand yard stare out the window after denying the accusations from the Kettlemans says it all.
These moments are a godsend in a world of television that feels compelled to explicate every moment, thought, and feeling a character has. This is one of the flashier, more combastic episode of Better Call Saul there is, and even there, it’s filled to the brim with that subtlety, that silence, where the viewer can practically feel what each player is thinking, but it never has to be said.
Some of that speaks to the excellent restraint shown by the show time and again. Some of it speaks to the extraordinary performances across the board. But some of it speaks to how well-established so many of these characters are, to where we know how they’ll respond to a situation, can follow their line of thinking, without the show needing to explain anything.
You can tell because it applies even to the show’s tertiary characters. In its final season, Better Call Saul is bookending a few things. We see Craig and Betsy Kettleman for the first time in a long time, but their dynamic, the mix of meek and menacing in response to Saul and Kim, makes it feel like they never left in terms of how fleshed out and vivid they seem. We get the return of Erin, who’s so distinctive that she can only get a handful of lines and still come off like a presence. And with a few simple phrases and looks and bits of basic kindness, Clifford Main can seem like the most decent person in entire Breaking Bad universe.
But this isn’t a universe where decency tends to prevail. There are two people ready to do whatever may be necessary to win the day here. Kim Wexler is ready to turn the Kettlemans’ red white and blue trailer and inflatable Statue of Liberty that sparks something in Saul into a smoking crater if they won’t play ball. Gus Fring is ready to threaten Manuel Varga to get to his son, whom he plans to eliminate as soon as he can get his hands on him. No quarter is given, no mercy shown, with so much on the line.
What stands between them and their figuratively or literally bloody ends are two unlikely moral guardians. Jimmy and Mike have done awful things. They have, directly and indirectly, killed people. They’ve bloodied their hands. They’ve put their loved ones at risk. And nevertheless, they’ll try to make things right however they can despite their respective partners’ hunger for blood. Things have gone topsy turvy when these two criminals are the voices of compassion and mercy.
It comes with the implicit suggestion that things might have gone too far. Normally sure-footed, self-possessed, meticulous people like Kim and Gus may be pressing, taking steps beyond even where boundary pushers like Saul and Mike dare to tread. Amid all of this back and forth, at the final moment of the episode, lurks is an agent of disruption, ready to sew these two halves of the show together in vengeful terms, and maybe force a confrontation between the two conflicting philosophies that divide men and women on both sides of such severe acts.
[8.8/10] The basic moral compass of Train to Busan isn’t hard to uncover. Compassion and altruism are not just valued; they are the measure of worth. Selfishness and indifference are not just bad; they are damning. Seok-woo’s journey in the film brings him from one end of the spectrum to the other, from looking out only for himself in difficult times and neglecting his daughter to constantly put himself at risk to benefit others and ultimately sacrificing himself to save his little girl and a veritable stranger.
The film has scads of fantastic qualities. It’s a truly frightening horror film. It’s a thrilling action film. It is well-acted in moments amusing, tense, or heartbreaking. It’s shot and constructed with an intensity and virtuosity to make the wide variety of moments at play here work. It even finds a way to give shading to a whole troupe of characters in a short amount of time so that their close scrapes and unfortunate demises have meaning and emotional impact.
But the best thing about Train to Busan is how it maximizes that essential feature of the zombie genre -- the ability to turn situation after situation into a moral test. Like the best undead flicks, this is not just a creature feature, content to sic hordes of flesh-eating monsters on likable-enough protagonists and call it a day. Instead, it asks the audience what they would do, what they would sacrifice to save others, what risks they would take because it’s the right thing to do even if it puts oneself in the line of fire, over and over again.
Those ethical thought experiments carry the impressive visual acumen of director Yeon Sang-ho’s approach to zombified terror, and they’re steps along the path toward Seok-woo’s journey from dastard to hero. But they also valorize and damn those who pass or fail them, and exemplify the themes the movie is so interested in, of compassion made manifest, classism abounding, and the lack of absolution that comes from “just following orders.”
All of these ideas are realized in chances to throw your fellow man under the bus (er...train) or instead save him when you could succumb to the zombies yourself in the process. They’re dramatized in the cruel and duplicitous COO of a train company who’s constantly ordering around or even sacrificing those lower in the pecking order than he is. And they come alive when investment fund employees, train assistants, and even soldiers are given orders to do things they know are wrong, but must decide whether to carry out anyway.
That’s the secret weapon of all zombie films -- they are as much about the horror that lies within the hearts of man as they are the chomping ghouls pursuing the living. No sequence in Train to Busan represents that better than the climax of the second act, where a band of plucky survivors have made it through car after car of ravenous zombies and nearly reached the safety of the first class cabin.
On one end, our heroes frantically hold and bash and struggle to keep the zombies from getting into the intermediate care. And on the other, they push and beg and fight to be let into the safety of the car ahead, which has been tied off to prevent them from getting in. The threat is not just the inhuman beings who thoughtlessly nip at your flesh; it’s in the human cruelty and self-centeredness that lets innocent lives perish to save your own skin. Both threats must be overcome, and feed on one another.
There are few more cathartic moments than when an old woman, sitting safely within the front car, witnesses those scrappy survivors banished by her cowardly compatriots, not to mention her selfless sister left to succumb to the dead, and opens the door to the zombies to give her fellow passengers their just deserts. It speaks to the moral opprobrium and throughline that runs through the entire film.
Even if you’re not interested in ethical conundrums made all the more salient through the lens of flesh-eating monsters, Train to Busan works at a pure craft level as a dose of both terror and action. Sang-ho and company know how to construct any number of scares and superlative sequences to keep your blood pumping. Whether it’s a mass of zombified soldiers rushing our heroes, quasi-stealth missions though undead-infested train cars, or daring escapes from tipped over coaches stuffed with zombies only held back by rapidly cracking glass, the film’s creative team keeps the frights coming one after another and with supreme skill.
They also know how to put together scene after scene of jaw-dropping action. There’s a sense in which Train to Busan is akin to something like Night of the Living Dead meets Die Hard. It can boast an undercurrent of social commentary and an estranged husband and father making up for past mistakes in a hairy situation. But it also features a heap of regular joes improvising thrilling solutions to the onslaught of undead. That comes in the form of bruising beat downs of snarling zombies, races against time as the hordes advance, and chained up skirmishes leaving hero and villain alike dangling perilously from a moving vehicle. If you just want average folks doing above average stunts, this is the movie for you.
And yet, what elevates Train to Busan is that it imbues so much character and feeling into those moments, whether bombastic or quiet. There’s not much time to develop anyone here, since most of the survivors fall into recognizable archetypes and there’s a lot of them. But the movie packs in tons of personality to make up for it, focusing on the relationships between the characters, expressed in miniature but recognizable to the audience.
That gives the movie power when Seok-woo slowly but surely puts himself through bigger and bigger risks to protect his daughter and the other innocent people caught in this danger. It gives it meaning when a hard-scrabble, lower class man proves himself more worthy of praise and admiration than the rich bastard throwing all his neighbors to the proverbial wolves. And it gives it emotional force when Seok-woo’s daughter sings the song she’d been practicing for her dad, unwittingly saving her life, feeling seen and responding with admiration for her father for possibly the first time, in a tragic way.
For all its zombie spills and chills, for all of its well-done action, Train to Busan isn’t really about its high octane horror. It’s about the moral choices we make in difficult circumstances, what they say about us and how we see ourselves, and how those crises can uncover the better people we might still become, if only to save those we love.
This was everything I wanted after the previous episode. It's no surprise to see that Vince Gilligan directed it - there's a lot of the slow, "taking in the moment" shots that capitalize on everything that's happening, letting everything sink in while keeping the tension going. This one reminded me a lot of "Face Off" (Breaking Bad season 4's ending) with Gus slowly walking to the nursing home - Kim walking to the door it's the same type of situation where we're expecting something to go down, but it takes as long as it needs to to get us there.
Something great about this episode is I think it's a perfect showcase of how Gus is not only highly intelligent, but also has an extreme level of perception to the point that observing how someone speaks/what they say, or a very small detail (like the laundry fan) can make him figure out what's going on around him or notice when he's exposed, based on the context of whatever situations he's dealing with. It's a "Sherlock Holmes" type of awareness, and this isn't the first time we've seen this in BCS (we had his look when he noticed Nacho had a role in Hector's stroke, and a few others) but the episode does seem to lean on it more than any others. Probably my biggest nitpick with Breaking Bad was that I never understood why Gus figured out that his car was a risk in the hospital (when Walt tried to bomb it), but now I feel I can process better that he can tell he was lured there - I feel as if I understand the character a lot more.
By the same token, it seems he can anticipate and prepare for a lot of outcomes, so leaving the gun in the laundry - which I also didn't understand at first - is him probably him deducing Lalo is interested in the lab and being like, "there's a 5% chance he will find and enter this lab, and an even smaller chance that I will be with him when he does - but if that happens, there should be a gun here." But him being in the position of being held at gunpoint and actually taking shots shouldn't happen, as Mike points out, and only shows that his feelings about the Salamancas are his only weakness - we see it when he drops his glass earlier in the season, and of course, when it gets exploited by Walter later. (Funny enough, Mike demands to be present if Gus gets "a wild hair to play detective" - but can't be present in BB due to his injury. I 100% think if Mike was there, they would've caught and killed Walter.)
Also, Howard deserves a mention - I'm glad he got more of a proper "send off" here, with the cold open and Mike's respect of the body, even if what happened is still terrible and one of the most tragic things to come from the show. Mike's facial expressions alone made me think this was the show's attempt at showing reverence, in a way. I'm interpreting it as if he was remarking on Howard's innocence in his head, and like to imagine he set the car in the beach with the wallet and ring personally.
This show is not only an expansion/continuation of Breaking Bad, but also just a wonderful gift for any Breaking Bad fan. The way the entire production crew treats the material is something that I really think should be considered a "golden standard" by anyone else who's embarking on the journey of making a prequel spin-off (looking at you, Disney). Better Call Saul has constantly showed how you can make a prequel that adds to the story we know in the future, but doesn't really go for cheap tricks - by paying so much attention to detail and building a show that stands on its own legs, they manage to still create moments that are still 100% tense and have us on the edge of our seats even if we know the fate of multiple characters involved. Like, we know Jimmy will go on to be Saul Goodman and be more involved with crime - but here, we're wondering how he'll process what just happened and can't wait to see it next week - what other prequel has done that? Everything feels completely earned, and I love them for making it that way.
This was a slog to get through. I don't know why they decided to give early One Piece's weakest villains a two-parter, not to mention that they're even cringier in live action. Whoooo, cat pirates, scary!
All I could think of while watching this episode was, SMILE! ANYBODY, PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD SMILE OR LAUGH OR DO ANYTHING BUT BROOD! This ain't Mr. Robot, guys, it's a funny pirate show!
Kaya got more character development than Usopp in his own arc, isn't that crazy? I suspect it's because they realized Usopp's actor can't... well, act too good. Very unfortunate because now Usopp barely feels like a character at all, and gone is his pigheadedness and selflessness that makes him a worthy member of the Strawhats. He's basically just been hanging out all this time and watching the other Strawhats hog his character-establishing moments.
I agree with another comment, Nami is saving this for me.
[5.7/10] This one is pretty dumb. I could frankly stop there. But the “What if reddit, except everything?” premise is stupid enough to warrant further explication, so here we go.
Let’s start with this. Somewhere in “Majority Rule”, there is the germ of a good point about social shaming with inadequate empathy and rushes to judgment. Unfortunately, that’s not really what we get here. Instead, we get a ridiculously caricatured version of online social interactions and a superficial media satire whose only real message is “mobs bad,” missing basically all of the nuance in the topics it addresses.
There’s legitimate issues to explore on this topic in the vein of So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed and the fact that people can be pilloried in the court of public opinion without, necessarily, much fairness in the evaluation, let alone a path to penitence and redemption. But The Orville hasn’t proven itself capable of tackling those issues, and certainly fails to do so well here.
Frankly, this episode comes off alternatingly whiny and self-satisfied. Oh no! Celebrities who are culturally insensitive or do stupid things publicly have to make public apologies for it! What a crime! Talk show hosts are more likely to throw fuel on the fire than be fair arbiters of right and wrong! What an insightful observation! The whole routine with LaMarr’s statue-grinding evaluation by the public just so superficial and caricatured, that even if it was more on point, it wouldn’t have much force.
Beyond that, it’s just a dumb realization of the idea. Look, maybe badges where people’s social standing and mental well-being gets determined by personal upvotes and downvotes could pass as a premise in the 1960s Star Trek series, but it just feels silly and implausible here.
If you want to make an allegory for modern behavior work, you need to construct a fictional equivalent that makes sense, or at the very least passes the smell test. That was one of the great things in “About a Girl” -- it raises a lot of issues through a set of cultural practices that were different from our own, but which were plausible in an alternate society. But even at its most extreme, the concept of an entire society ruled by reddit upvotes where social opinion dictates everything just sounds like such an absurd slippery slope presentation that the episode doesn’t even work on a pure story level.
There’s some mild tension in the threat that LaMarr will be lobotomized if his apology tour doesn’t go well. There’s also some good nuts and bolts Trek here in having to infiltrate a pre-warp society to investigate other researchers who’ve run afoul of their different rules and disappeared. The same goes for bringing one of the locals on board to convince them that there’s another way. But it’s all done in service of a thought experiment from a fourteen-year-old.
The worst part is the conference room conversation Mercer and the others have with that local resident of the insane upvote-driven planet. There’s such a ham-handed and smug moral expressed about the tyranny of the majority and mixing up fact and opinion. It plays like nothing more than knocking down strawmen and feeling like you just toppled a giant. And that’s before you get to more of the show’s tepid 21st century observational humor.
Usually on The Orville, the basic premise works but things are dragged down by comedy or relationship drama. But this is the first one where it’s the execution of the core idea that’s bad, especially given the misaimed (or at least oversimplified) point of the episode. There’s a good conversation to be had about call out culture and the way things are parsed out online, but “Majority Rule” is incapable of making an intelligent contribution to that discussion.
I knew it. You get pregnant by kissing.
What an interesting tale that one! No dark bargain with the Devil this time! Just a man and his wish! Very refreshing to watch!
This weaves the anthological element from the previous season by tying this seemingly unrelated character directly to Earn and his story, illuminating his character as much as his killer monologued. It's a power fantasy borne out, and so often when they leave our heads they go from comforting and understandable coping to something ugly and destructive, including of ourselves.
Oddly enough, as opposed to the anime/manga, I feel that the show is moving too fast, not building characters and their relationships properly, which kinda ruins things for me a little bit.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to meet the rest of the crew and the whole bunch of whacky evil pirates they'll bump into!
I wanted to like this movie more than I did. It's critically acclaimed; it was arguably the first cult classic of the 2010s. The cast is stellar, especially Oscar Isaacs and Albert Brooks. Isaacs in his ten or so minutes of screen time brings charisma and sympathy to what could've been a very one note and stereotypical role. And Brooks plays to perfection a man who never wanted things to reach this point and holds no ill will towards the Driver and friends for having the bad luck to all into this situation, but will not hesitate to finish this. And yet the film still didn't enthrall me.
It is a well crafted film in many areas. The soundtrack is gorgeous. There are some inspired choices made with the cinematography that took my breath away. When Irene deals with the news of her husband's death, her hue is grey and lifeless. When she kisses the Driver, she glows, iridescent. There's the Driver's face gazing longingly across the screen, cut simultaneously with his last phone call with Irene. The shot of the Driver, face splattered in blood and his eyes shifting into cold determination realizing what he has to do, slinking out of frame and into the shadows as he turns from prey to predator is striking. And the Driver stalking down the man who caused this all on the beach, face covered in an expressionless mask, only briefly illuminated by the lighthouse as he nears closer and the synths blare is a moment that'd stand with any slasher movie. And yet I still did not love this movie.
I think ultimately, this film doesn't come together for me. By the end, I see its point- there is no glamor to this, no matter what the neon lights, pounding synths, and beautiful aesthetics tell you. A father is dead. A sad man bleeds out in his garage. The violence is not a cathartic rush of adrenaline, but quick and passionless executions. There's no shooting out of your seat and hollering, and there's no triumph at the end of the Driver's fight. He's lost his one chance at normalcy. There was no point to all of this, as reinforced by the story of the Scorpion and the Frog, alluded to throughout by the scorpion jacket Driver is adorned in. The frog was willing to get them all through the river and do his job, if the scorpions were only willing to trust him. But by striking instead, they've only doomed them all. Looking at it from a distance, it all comes together.
But when I zoom in, much rings hollow. The romance between the Driver and Irene feels limp and tepid, devoid of chemistry. This is a fatal flaw when the Driver explicitly says the time spent with her and her son was the best time of his life; this is his motivation for everything he does, but I don't believe in it. Driver becomes friends with the husband almost instantaneously to make his death hit harder, but it comes off forced. The film relies on one montage buoyed by (the admittedly fantastic) track A Real Hero to do the work, and it isn't enough. The scenes with them are a slog.
Ryan Gosling, too, is a weak link. There are moments when he works, mainly the aforementioned times he goes all out slasher, detached and clinical as he works his way through the men who've caused this. The despair and anger and self-disgust on his trembling face in the elevator scene is such a chilling moment that you understand completely why Irene breaks away from him. But those moments come far too sparingly, and in between Gosling is less Michael Myers, less a ice cold surface hiding a broken machine trying and failing to function in this world and more a half baked Byronic hero. He does too many long looks and too many small smiles meant to give a sense of romance to him, and it leaves me cold. As soon as Oscar Isaac showed up, I was wishing he was the star instead, which isn't a good sign.
Drive is a film that looks pretty, and it seems pretty great from a bird's eye view. But with a closer look, the pieces crash against each other instead of coalescing. Still worth a watch for some great songs, some immaculate shots, and a great soundtrack, but it falls short of a classic, cult or otherwise, in my eyes.
Becomes cartoonishly goofy with its evil characters and suffers from overbearingly cloying dramatic force at times, but if that doesn't bother you it's a very stylish power fantasy wanna be epic morality film with a charismatic performance from Hugo Weaving. Personally, I was put off by aforementioned issues when watching it in my early twenties.
The funeral scene was fucking chaotic and hilarious, the kid screaming, the woman trying to get in the coffin, the guy shouting “world star!” and then the guy saying “we’re scaring the white people”
The excellent camerawork and music are really what end up selling this. Some of the shots in this blew my mind, especially the tracking shot during the first meeting between Joel Edgerton and Christopher Abbott. The acting’s also very good, the characters and drama are compelling. I could’ve done without the shifting aspect ratios though, its use makes some of the revelations a little predictable. It also could’ve used some more memorable scenes in general, I’m unsure how much I’ll remember from it after a while.
Still, this is a good exercise in drama and building tension. The horror of it is a minor footnote, don’t go in expecting a cheap slasher or some schlocky premise. It does provide plenty of food for thought, but you have to piece a lot of it together yourself. The title doesn’t refer to anything concrete, more of an abstract concept. It’s a little artsy, but not inaccessible, though it requires critical analysis and engagement in order to appreciate, otherwise you’ll outright hate it.
7/10
