The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006) Review

The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006)

Tokyo Drift finds itself in a precarious position in the Fast and Furious movie series. When Paul Walker declined to return, the production wiped the slate clean with an entirely new cast and crew that almost completely ignored the previous two installments. This paved the way for director Justin Lin and writer Chris Morgan’s partnership to bend the movies to their creative wills for four straight entries. It’s also a bridge film of sorts between the grittier action movie approach of the later Fast films and the earlier, more colorful racing-focused phase of the series. Tokyo Drift represents both the end times (almost literally, considering its low box office) and the beginning of a new era, the first indication being that Lin and Morgan crafted by far the best movie in the series yet at that point in time.

Tokyo Drift is essentially the Halloween 3 of Fast and Furious movies: shunned by fans at the time of its release for not featuring the old characters, and then later accepted as a cult favorite. It takes the same combination of oversized egos and machismo and transplants them to a new setting where they feel right at home: high school. If The Fast and the Furious was Point Break and 2 Fast 2 Furious was Miami Vice, then Tokyo Drift is the Karate Kid of the series. Southern boy protagonist Sean Boswell (Lucas Black) is an outsider even in his hometown, and with a 1971 Monte Carlo as his early car of choice the movie establishes from the start that he’s a gear hound amongst a bunch of wannabe chest-pumpers.

 

But the movie serves as a subtle subversion of the series’ sense of bravado by having Sean mess up…a lot. Even when he beats the asshole jock in the opening he still ends up wrecking his car, and up until late in the game Sean’s ego is consistently brought down notches once he’s shipped off to Tokyo to live with his father and to quit racing. Of course he doesn’t quit, because there needs to be a movie, and he ends up losing badly to local racing celebrity “D.K.” (Drift King). Despite this, he catches the eye of racer Han Seoul-Oh (just roll with it). Han is an anomaly in this crowd; he doesn’t engage with the boasting attitude that permeates this mini-society, often standing to the side eating his snacks while everyone else talks their heads off.

Han is the true standout of Tokyo Drift, and much of this can be attributed to Sung Kang’s nonchalantly cool performance. He doesn’t need to say much because he knows that he can walk the walk while everyone else is too busy throwing horribly written insults at each other (the dialogue may debatably be the worst in the series, which is quite an accomplishment), and his Zen-master training helps Sean become a better racer. With all-due respect to the late Paul Walker, Lucas Black is a much more charismatic lead for these movies, capturing the cowboy fun and excitement of shifting into high gear and barreling through the neon-lit streets of Tokyo.

What pushes this particular Fast and Furious over the edge as one of the best in the series is the sense that Lin and Morgan are having fun with the material too. This is immediately apparent in the action sequences, each of which is different and wilder than the last and display a greater sense of rhythm than any seen in the previous movies. Lin’s set pieces crackle with reckless energy, particularly during an escape from D.K.’s goons and the final race along the winding mountainside roads. The addition of drifting into the mix is mostly just window dressing, though it allows for much more exciting scenarios than simple drag races. Lin’s more straightforward style is less reliant on gimmicky tricks to translate the adrenaline rush to his audience, letting the frenzied editing and camera do the work on their own.

The director understands how to project the thrill of racing better than his predecessors did, and it’s not hard to see why his and Morgan’s partnership on this series lasted for four movies straight. They understand that driving is in the blood of these characters; they live and breathe it. Sean’s romance with local schoolgirl Neela is best expressed not with words but when she takes him for a graceful ride along the countryside. Due to this and other factors, Tokyo Drift is arguably the only movie of the bunch that, at its heart, is truly about racing. Even the first and second movies owe themselves more to their crime genre influences than gear head classics such as Gone in 60 Seconds (1974), and when Sean finally owns up to his poor decisions to D.K.’s gangster father (martial artist Sonny Chiba), their agreement boils down to one final race to settle the rivalry.

The characters are played straight but the tone of their adventure is done with a subtle nudge and wink (Bow Wow’s annoying sidekick Twinkie literally winks at the camera when he enters an elevator full of women). The backdrop of Tokyo provides a colorful playground for the characters to roam in, and Lin relishes in the cartoonish little details of the racing world like Twinkie’s tricked-out Incredible Hulk car. The term “car porn” has often been applied to these movies and that has never been more true than here, basking in the sleek edges of international sports cars while admiring the raw power of American muscle. Tokyo Drift is about the bridging of cultures and worlds across the sea, all of which is given a nice bowtie when Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toretto shows up at the end to race Sean, a nice acknowledgement that the movie is not just The Fast and the Furious in name only. It would be a shame to toss the movie aside because of its hard-swerve into a new direction for the franchise, one that would set the course for the insane heights to come.

2 Fast 2 Furious (2003) Review

2 Fast 2 Furious (2003)

Note: Check out my original 2009 review to see how much of a better writer I am now

2 Fast 2 Furious is exactly the type of sequel that one would expect to come from a movie such as The Fast and the Furious. There are more cars, more racing scenes, more beautiful women, and more dumb sequel titling. It’s the type of sequel that replicates the shiny surface details that defined the first movie without trying anything new or even understanding why that movie resonated on some level with its audience. The Fast and the Furious is not particularly good even by action movie standards, though it still merits a spot in the genre’s annals for the niche world it created and Vin Diesel’s authoritative role. Now with Diesel off working on his other iconic role, this 2 dumb 2 care sequel tries to keep cruising along a yet-to-be-defined series path even as it doubles down on the elements that didn’t work out last time.

With only Paul Walker returning to his part as Brian O’Connor, 2 Fast serves as a soft restart that allows for newcomers who can jump right in without missing a beat and also returning fans who want to see where undercover cop Brian’s story goes after letting Diesel’s Dominic Toretto ride off to freedom. He’s now fully integrated into the racing subculture on the Miami front with a whole new group of friends to call his own, including future “Fast and Furious Avengers” member Tej Parker. Knowing that Fast Five would fold back Ludacris’ character (and others) into the series got me wondering: why stop there? I say Devon Aoki’s Suki and her pink ride are long overdue for a return call, especially since she gets more to do and say than Letty did in installment one and yet I haven’t seen her get a death/revenge/resurrection storyline. (Spoiler?)

It’s a new world with a new director in John Singleton but done with the same old tricks, even the ones that failed before. The digital effects found in The Fast and the Furious’ opening drag race were excessive but Singleton, perhaps due to his lack of experience in action movies, pushes them to a higher, much more obtrusive degree. Not content to simply let the cars’ power and speed speak for themselves, the director opens the movie with a race through the Miami streets that’s filled with distractingly digital camera movements and unconvincing computer-generated vehicles. Even the sequence’s money shot, where Brian’s car flies over an opponent’s on a drawbridge, loses all impact due to its obviously faked nature. Real cars doing real stunts are viscerally exciting; fake cars doing fake stunts are just video game cut scenes.

One of the few set pieces that is mostly free of these distractions is a memorably crunchy race around the Miami highways so that drug kingpin Carter Verone can pick a couple of drivers for his operations. If the first movie was glorified Point Break redo then this one does the same for Miami Vice, complete with corrupt cops, undercover cops, loose cannon (ex)cops, and angry chief cops. It’s also written more in line with the buddy cop genre along the likes of Lethal Weapon rather than the serious crime thriller tone of the previous movie, bringing in Tyrese Gibson as Brian’s estranged old friend Roman Pearce. Brian and Roman’s reluctant alliance brings forth a history of bottled tension and also possibly the greatest repressed gay action movie romance since Maverick and Iceman played volleyball.

 

Their charged banter together is so laced with unintentional innuendo and Roman’s resentment of Brian’s attraction to undercover FBI agent Monica Fuentes is so strong that it’s hard not to pick up on it. But there’s no time for love when they’ve got to take down Verone for the FBI men that hired them to infiltrate the operation. The clearer goals give the movie a tighter focus and momentum than the slippery plotting of Rob Cohen’s entry, but they’re undercut by Cole Hauser’s apathetic performance as the lead villain. Hauser, who coincidentally costarred with Vin Diesel in Pitch Black, hits the same low pitch growl note for his personality-less performance in every scene, sapping away any sense of menace to the heroes. Mendes fares only slightly better given the lack of real material written for her, and yet she’s arguably more useful to the plot than any other female in the series until part six.

Walker and Gibson’s tense friendship (possibly more?) is the real backbone that keeps the movie going through its rough patches, and their chemistry together brings out a looser side to Walker’s performance that was previously missing. The free-wheeling sunny spirit of the movie itself is a virtue too as it moves along at a fast clip all the way up to its sprawling climax across the streets and swamps of Miami. But apart a Dukes of Hazzard-esque car jump 2 Fast 2 Furious is lacking in memorable values, and with a visual style that screams “USA Original Series” it loses the underworld mystique of its predecessor. Its biggest lasting merits wouldn’t come until years later when Fast Five brought Mendes (briefly), Tyrese and Ludacris back into the mix, so it is important to the franchise in a roundabout way, but as its own entity the movie lacks inspiration to stand out.

The Fast and the Furious (2001) Review

The Fast and the Furious (2001)

Note: Check out my original 2009 review to see how much of a better writer I am now

The dirty little secret of the Fast and Furious series is that they were never really about the cars they so proudly displayed. Writer Gary Scott Thompson used the Vibe Magazine article “Racer X” as an inspiration for the first installment, but the series has proven itself to be a strange and ever-changing beast since entering the pop culture landscape 14 years ago. And then there’s the popular, rather true notion that the original movie is basically just Point Break with cars instead of surfboards, and we never talk about Point Break as a surfing movie. The Fast movies are an often lost and yet bizarrely coherent collection of pieces that have adapted to extenuating circumstances over time into something bigger and altogether more interesting than originally envisioned.

However, to understand the context of its zigzagging evolution we need to return to the beginning. The characters of The Fast and the Furious live apart from the rest of us with their unique world that’s powered by magically ready-made rolls of cash, a little elbow grease, and a lot of attitude. The movie presents a clear distinction between the “normal” world and the nightlife racing culture as the sun sets and the flashy neon cars light up the streets. Director Rob Cohen lovingly pans his camera across these cars with as much fetishistic glee as he does the scantily clad women that cling to the drivers like rock band groupies. Cohen and Thompson create this insular microcosm of people that all know each other and the code of respect that defines them, so when Paul Walker’s Brian O’Connor presses his way into this circle he immediately stands out like bleached-blonde sore thumb.

Walker’s severe stiffness as an actor almost works for the character; sometimes it’s hard to tell in the early scenes whether Walker is just trying to pull off a convincing line delivery or if the actor is playing this up to emphasize the undercover cop’s weariness. Walker’s lack of screen presence, intentional or not, is put into perspective every time he shares a scene with Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toretto. Before we even get to know Dom, Cohen and Thompson lay the bricks for his legend status in the racing community. Cohen stages his introduction in such a way that we already understand the type of person he is before Diesel opens his mouth. With his back turned to the camera and two crossed shotguns adorning the office wall, Dom is immediately established as the outlaw figure who only enters trouble when absolutely necessary.

In Diesel’s hands Dom is the ideal image of macho bravado without the toxic impulsiveness that undoes many of the other characters in this society, including those in his own crew. Even as the Fast movies found their voice late in life, their baritone lead actor never quite recaptured the same level of charisma he displayed here. The hyper-macho attitude extends to everyone else in the movie, with every guy trying to one-up each other in races and insults. So pervasive is the movie’s manly nature that one of its few prominent females, Michelle Rodriguez’s Letty, is so masculine that she takes the phrase “just one of the guys” to another level.

The only sensible way for these people to vent themselves is through the thrill of underground street racing, a life so in-tuned to their desires that they might be able to describe the accessories of their cars faster than Cohen can montage them. But Cohen has a few tools of his own; his computer-assisted journeys into the car engines have become a trademark element of the series. A character’s press of the NOS button is more than just a little boost, it’s an intricate mini roller coaster that gets to the literal heart of these speed machines and provides the movie’s audience with an adrenaline shot of their own. Cohen pushes the effects to such a degree in the first drag race that the cars feel like they’re gliding more on pixels than pavement as he relies too much on green screen effects when real driving would have worked to better effect.

This is certainly true with the botched truck robbery that comes right as everything starts falling to pieces for both the characters and the increasingly haphazard plot momentum. When looking at the larger set pieces to follow in the sequels, this sequence is rather stripped back in comparison, and to its advantage. Dom, against his better judgment, tries to save resident asshole crewmate Vince from the shotgun-wielding driver, whose faceless presence gives him an otherworldly quality, recalling the sinister and also unseen villain of Steven Spielberg’s classic Duel. The entire sequence is accomplished with nary a trace of digital trickery, allowing the tension to build naturally through a series of close-calls, daring maneuvers, and Dom’s refusal to let his friend go.

This drives at the heart of what this tight knit group of people is all about, which is the binding force of family. For all it’s races and clashes, of which there’s surprisingly little of for an action movie, The Fast and the Furious is much more concerned with its bromantic bonds and attitude than it is about getting the adrenaline pumping, which works both for and against itself. Like any outlaws, Dom and his crew live by a code; it’s just that this code is often expressed through the simple pleasures of a Corona and some barbeque with mates.  The outlandish world of street racing is made human, even as it retains its ridiculous nature with earnestly acted nonsensical dialogue such as, “I live my life a quarter mile at a time.” Try as it might, words and convincing emotion aren’t the movie’s strong suits.

This presents a problem later on when the drama feels like it should be hitting a peak and yet stalls out repeatedly in the third act. The plot continuously pivots around its multiple threads and never manages to bring them together in a cohesive fashion, leaving the disjointed climax to fizzle out before it can generate real excitement. The final drag race between Brian and Dom feels like a forced attempt to provide closure, especially when the impending threat of Brian’s LAPD superiors turns out to be a total non-starter. The perfect analogy for The Fast and the Furious is Brian’s first street race experience: he has the right tools and just enough bluster to carry himself through, but he sputters out wildly before hitting the finish line, leaving a trail of smoke and little else to show for it.

TV Review: Better Call Saul (1×06) – “Five-O”

TV Review: Better Call Saul (1×06) – “Five-O”

Reprinted from The Young Folks as posted on March 11, 2015

How’s this for a change of pace? Last week, Better Call Saul shifted the perspective from Jimmy McGill to Mike Ehrmantraut for its closing minutes as it concisely put into focus the lonely and closed off existence that Mike has built around himself. The final beat had two officers from Philadelphia arriving to question Mike about a matter from his old home city, and although “Five-O” follows up on this, the majority of the episode details the tragic and noir-laced circumstances that led to the estrangement from his family and his eventual arrival in Albuquerque.

Aside from a brief appearance from Jimmy when Mike calls upon his services in custody, “Five-O” takes a notably serious side-turn from the lighter McGill saga. Jimmy does get some great moments in his limited screen time, from the coffee spill routine to the line, “I look like a young Paul Newman, dressed as Matlock,” though the meat of the episode rests in Mike’s relationship with his widowed daughter-in-law Stacey. The death of Mike’s son, who was also on the Philadelphia force, put a strain on them, explaining their apprehensive looks at each other last week. Their weathered existence with each other is reflected in the scene where Mike plays with his granddaughter Kaylee on the swings, where a high angle shot reveals the patchy backyard and difficult history is drudged up between them.

This difficult history is represented in the blue-tinted flashbacks that adorn “Five-O,” evoking the chilly, hard-bitten atmosphere of film noir. All of Mike’s actions that bring him to this present state are fueled by the revelations that spill out in a teary-eyed monologue to Stacey. Jonathon Banks already elevated Mike to iconic status during his tenure on Breaking Bad, but “Five-O” cracks open the hidden mysteries of his life in such a way that completely reinvents how this character is viewed. Banks too reveals greater depths in this man throughout his performance here, and the concluding monologue is a crowning moment for the storied character actor’s career.

I would be curious to know the reactions to this episode from Better Call Saul viewers who haven’t had the chance to go through Breaking Bad, and this is something that ran through my mind once I realized that the hour would be dedicating it’s time almost solely to this haggard man. Breaking Bad fans certainly gain a lot from seeing Mike’s past explored in detail, but what of the viewers who only know Mike as the amusing parking attendant? This is the ultimate problem with prequels in general and one that I hope the shows writers can sidestep in the future: prequels are written with the foreknowledge of what happens later, meaning that writers can have a tendency to place greater importance on elements that don’t hold as much weight for people who lack said foreknowledge. They’re taken along for the ride without entirely understanding the import of these events, especially when a show unexpectedly swerves to the side for an ancillary character at best.

This isn’t to say that the events lack the necessary weight, and once the episode transitions back to Philly again to Mike walking into a bar from a dark alley it’s become totally immersed in the iconography of film noir. The high contrast blue-tinged lighting and Mike’s boozy interactions at the bar fill out the generally chilly tone, one that turns especially dark once he exacts revenge on the two officers who murdered his son. Also interesting is how these events concerning Mike and his son strained his relationship with Stacey much like how Slippin’ Jimmy did the same with Chuck, adding in a thematic thread that ties Jimmy and Mike’s stories together in a way that will likely bring them closer together. To these two men, their stories are ones of repair and absolution in the face of greater disappointment, but seeing how this is only the beginning of their stories I highly doubt that their reaches for redemption in the eyes of family will last very long.

TV Review: Better Call Saul (1×05) – “Alpine Shepherd Boy”

TV Review: Better Call Saul (1×05) – “Alpine Shepherd Boy”

Reprinted from The Young Folks as posted on March 4, 2015

There’s a point in “Alpine Shepherd Boy” where Jimmy McGill goes to see a new client after his billboard hero story and I wondered whether or not Better Call Saul was about to head down into a procedural route blended with the serialized storytelling. The premise of a lawyer with his sharp wit and wacky clientele could easily fuel a more episodic series; a form of television that is exceedingly becoming endangered as long-form stories become more and more popular. I’ve admittedly turned a blind eye to more episodic fare on occasion because for some reason it is fashionable to look down upon them these days, but in the right hands (and this show is surely in the right hands) the material for a case-of-the-week Jimmy/Saul show could be wildly entertaining.

Alas, it doesn’t look like my pointlessly overlong side note will come to fruition if “Alpine Shepherd Boy” is an indication of the direction this show is headed into. It does, however, spend the bulk of its running time with Jimmy meeting his oddball set of new prospects, tipping the tonal scale from light drama over into eccentric farce. Each of these vignettes, from the tycoon who wants to secede from the U.S. to the inventor whose child toilet trainer inadvertently turns sexual, are funny in their own right. Tycoon Richard Sipes is quite the impressionable character and one who I wouldn’t mind seeing pop up time and time again as a minor recurring character, though I doubt that will happen.

 

I bring up the notion of episodic stories because they can be a reprieve from the bigger arcs that can’t always sustain the episode orders made for TV seasons, and “Alpine Shepherd Boy” feels like it’s dallying with the idea of going down that path without fully committing. The interludes with the clients are little more than humorous space fillers until Kim and Jimmy get the call about Chuck in the hospital, only to go back to Jimmy seeing his clients, and then jump back to him dealing with Chuck. The episode doesn’t balance its structure and tone between the two approaches as smoothly as it could have. I’ve also found that I’m not as fully invested in the relationship between Jimmy and Kim as the show would like me to be, although this week allows the two of them to share more personal interactions outside of work and see their softer sides together.

The matter of Chuck’s “condition” is given much more attention though, with Clea DuVall’s doctor confirming our suspicions that his “condition” is more mental than physical, something that I saw as the case from the start but is nevertheless given a rather longwinded explanation. I got the sense that “Alpine” was making a conscious comparison between Jimmy providing for his brother and the ways that we take care of the elderly once they hit a certain point in life. Chuck’s existence at home isn’t so different from that of a lonely elderly person sheltered from the outside world, and the older décor of his house along with its spare spaces suggest the loneliness he feels. On another (much shorter) side note, Jimmy watches the older TV show Matlock to get a feel for how he should present himself to the older crowd, and I couldn’t help but see the coincidental similarity between the logo for that show and the one for Breaking Bad with its periodic table design.

 

Speaking of the lonely and the elderly, the final minutes of the episode take an unexpected left turn into the life of parking attendant Mike, who is even more isolated than Chuck is. He sits alone at the diner and can’t even get close to talk to the mystery woman who acknowledges his presence with familiarity (I assume this is his daughter since Breaking Bad made a point of Mike’s affection for his granddaughter). Before the episode ends with (presumably) Mike’s old police partner and several officers approaching Mike at home, his house and living is defined by cold stillness, a quality that actor Jonathon Banks has used to define the character himself since being introduced many years ago. Chuck and Mike both have tentative threads holding them to the lives of others, but with Mike’s partner returning and Slippin’ Jimmy threatening to undo Chuck’s trust, it looks like the past is coming back to haunt them both.

TV Review: Agent Carter (1×08) – “Valediction”

TV Review: Agent Carter (1×08) – “Valediction”

Reprinted from The Young Folks as posted on February 25, 2015

Look, I love Captain America, and I love Captain America: The First Avenger; it’s one of the few Marvel movies that I actually like more each time I watch it. One of the reasons why it was such a success was the character Peggy Carter, whose strength as an independent character made her both stand out amidst other female comic book movie characters and established her as a viable subject for her own television series. She had both a compelling history and a captivating actress playing her in Hayley Atwell, and could command attention on her own terms without the need to be defined by her relationship with Captain America. So how did Agent Carter’s finale repay its lead? By making itself all about remembering Captain America and the man who couldn’t save him while pushing the heroine aside in her own story.

When the pilot contained scenes of Peggy haunted by Captain America’s disappearance after his noble sacrifice, I never imagined that the show would actually turn that into a major plot point that defined where the story lead to. And yet, somehow, despite never having any major thematic or story-based connection to Peggy’s investigation of Leviathan at the S.S.R., the specter of Steve Rogers’ death continually loomed overhead like a grey cloud that wouldn’t go away. Then, in a nakedly manipulative move, this all came to a head in the emotional climax of the finale where Peggy has to plead over the radio for a brainwashed Howard Stark to not gas New York much like she did the same when Steve Rogers decided to sacrifice himself to stop Hydra’s plan.

What makes this conclusion to the finale so disappointing is that the story shifts its focus from Peggy to Howard and suddenly the crux of our investment lies in Howard’s guilt over the weapons he invented and his failure to save Cap from his icy fate. Howard is certainly an integral figure in the Marvel Universe but to make the finale all about his salvation as well the heroes’ ability to move on from their sacrificial male icon feels like a disservice to the story about a female secret agent struggling to work against male dominance at her job. Atwell gives it her all as Peggy tearfully struggles to get through this déjà vu of events, but it’s not enough to distract from the unease of her serving Howard’s arc instead of the reverse.

Luckily, all of this stuff only happens in the last 15 minutes or so, and everything else surrounding it is pretty great even if Howard remains an attention hog both as a character and a focal point in the story. Dominic Cooper plays up Stark’s arrogance after turning himself in to the S.S.R. while still retaining his easy-going charm, particularly when he tells Thompson to say that they “are humbled by his brilliance” before a press conference. And of course, with him being Howard Stark, his numerous flings with women meant that Dottie once used that to get close to him for information. The sins of the past haunt Howard in more ways than one.

Dottie gets plenty of time to shine in this finale. She’s used her girlish persona to manipulate others into doing her bidding in both the past and present, but actress Bridget Regan takes the opportunity to infuse that into the character’s actual personality. During her much-anticipated clash with Peggy at the end, a breathlessly satisfying bout filled with hard punches and blunt instruments, Regan brings a childlike glee to the punishment Dottie brings down on Peggy. Her brief moments of triumph show delight in dishing out the violence, something that ends rather unexpectedly when Peggy kicks her out the nearby window. However, it looks like this won’t be the last we see of the nefarious Dottie Underwood.

As for the rest of the S.S.R., Thompson takes a backseat to the action as Sousa steps into the forefront. Following the boneheaded decision to literally stick his nose right in the midst of the dangerous gas, the disabled agent redeems himself when he saves Thompson from the clutches of Dr. Ivchenko and beats the bad Russian at his own hypnotic game. This doesn’t stop Thompson from taking the credit for the operation while Sousa and Peggy look on unrecognized for their heroism. Sousa tries to stick up for Peggy but, in one of the finest and most astute moments the show has conceived, she tells him to stand down, insisting, “I don’t need [their] approval. I know my value.”

In a show all about female empowerment, this was perhaps the most empowering bit of all, one that reasserts the character’s self-confidence and worth and helps to (slightly) alleviate the finale’s unfortunate shift in focus to the male characters, both living and frozen. There’s hope in the future as well, with Peggy and Sousa showing affection for each other even as she delays his advances, along with Peggy echoing the end of Titanic as she dumps Cap’s blood into the East River and finally learns to let go. Even with the bumps along the way, I’d rather not let go of Agent Carter, which provided a well-deserved spotlight for one of Marvel’s best female characters and the chance to elaborate on previously unexplored territory for the overarching universe.

TV Review: Better Call Saul (1×04) – “Hero”

TV Review: Better Call Saul (1×04) – “Hero”

Reprinted from The Young Folks as posted on February 24, 2015

Last week, Better Call Saul showed us an earlier point in the McGill brothers’ lives when Jimmy was in jail and Chuck comes to see him, which set up a cyclical arc for Jimmy to reform himself after many questionable life decisions and then revert back to his old ways to Chuck’s disappointment. “Hero” follows through on that thread in a major by dedicating its entire run time to Slippin’ Jimmy’s ways of sticking it to the man and coming out on top. The cold open goes even further than last week’s by showing him and another man play out a scam for money, something that echoes the actions he undertakes over the course of the next hour.

Back in the present, we pick up immediately after the end of “Nacho” with Jimmy confronting the Kettlemans over the stolen money and once again offering his legal services. They once again refuse him, but offer a bribe instead to keep him quiet. Chuck previously taught Jimmy that the way up the lawyer ladder is to do good work and the clients will come, though Jimmy’s flippant reaction to this piece of advice gives some indication as to why he ends up taking the money. Jimmy wants to do good by his brother to atone for his past sins, but he also sees the reality of his current situation that he is a man scraping by on the skids with barely a penny to his name.

The bribe money emboldens him much like it did for Walter White before him (or rather, after him), inspiring a rise in confidence as he pays off old fees and gets a makeover to celebrate. This boost in self-assurance also prompts a deliberate jab at Howard Hamlin and the others at Hamlin Hamlin & McGill by imitating their billboard advertisement. Jimmy no doubt knows that what he’s doing is wrong and will immediately prompt a response from Howard but he doesn’t care; he just wants a chance to rile them up in an elaborate prank. In Jimmy’s eyes, getting a reaction from them is enough to validate himself as a worthy opponent.

Just as the first two episodes established Jimmy’s relationship with Chuck and the third gave he and Kim the time to interact, “Hero” brings forth Howard Hamlin as a possible villain for Jimmy to square off against. As played by underappreciated character actor Patrick Fabian (whose performance in The Last Exorcism is a standout) he’s not an out-and-out bad guy as Jimmy’s actions and scams are of course unethical, not the least of which is the rescue stunt pulled by “saving” the fallen billboard man. There’s plenty of resentment bubbling between them that gets pulled forth during the cease-and-desist scene, and Fabian plays the role with just enough pomp to keep the audience on Jimmy’s side without turning him into a cartoon bully.

Propping these men up as adversaries creates another dynamic between the characters with Kim as the middle-woman torn between her allegiances. As another person torn in their feelings, Jimmy attempts to hide his ‘hero’ story in the newspaper from Chuck to no avail, and the pieces are in place to clash against each other. “Hero” is mostly a transitional episode getting the characters from place to place and setting them in motion for events to come in the future. There’s not much to write home about and I doubt that this will be looked back on as a particularly memorable episode for Better Call Saul’s debut season, but it does an admirable and competent job of moving the pieces forward in entertaining fashion.