This line of work doesn't suit you.
Bryan Cranston gives an award-winning and typecast-breaking performance as most people know him as the goofy dad from Malcolm in the Middle, but here proves drama is well within his range as he portrays all of the moods of anger and frustration at the state of his life and still maintain a sympathetic family man with great believability and chemistry with the other actors. His intelligent, but amateur criminal Walt meshes very well with Aaron Paul's portrayal of the former student Jesse Pinkman who is the career criminal of the two despite being incredibly inept at it most of the time. The characters show great depth and development such as Walt's reluctance to do criminal acts at first, but proves he is actually very good at it while Jesse may be a criminal, but is shown to be somewhat of a softie especially when it comes to kids. They are both very alike and very different.
No show does suspense as well as Breaking Bad which can make even quiet scenes of characters talking over drinks that are layered with moral quandaries and violent subtext in addition to some action scenes involving great acts of violence involving crooks and cops alike (and at least one douchebag in a sporty car) with just a dash of comedy for flavor. Top-notch writing and cinematography round out what has been a major hit for AMC and creator Vince Gilligan despite the writer's strike truncation to just 7 episodes.
Episodes to See:
Ep. 3 - …And the Bag's in the River - at the center of Walter's moral dilemmas and reluctance to commit fully to the criminal lifestyle with an excellent guest star performance from Maximino Arciniega.
Ep. 6 - Crazy Handful of Nothin - Walt just being a badass.
Buyer's Guide:
Available in both DVD and Blu-Ray sets and on iTunes, Netflix and Amazon.
4½ Acid-induced home repair projects out of 5
3 comments:
Started fantastic.
Got saggy and boring in the middle when Walt and Jesse weren't on-screen. Those two were the only characters I found engaging.
The women were irritating and bland.
Picked up again at the end.
Cranston is so damn good. He gets full marks but the first season as a whole gets:
3½ yay, science out of 5
Skylar and Marie only get worse. They are the reason I didn't give a full 5.
And it should be "Science, Bitch!"
Jesse is awesome.
Skylar gets so much more worse.
I actually like Marie a lot more than I did in the first 2 seasons. I was just thinking that as I'm going through the final eps of S4.
S1's got a few rough edges but all in all a great start to something that keeps getting better.
4 bitches, bitch out of 5
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