Risky revivals

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This article was published 11/10/2019 (2174 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

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So-called “appointment television” is a thing of the past, but sometimes there’s an event that’s sure to find viewers sitting down for a guaranteed spoiler-free experience.

El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie, which starts streaming on Netflix today, is one of those events.

The film has the promise of quality, as it’s written and directed by Breaking Bad’s brilliant creator Vince Gilligan, but we’d probably do well not to get our hopes up. In general, whether a TV show concluded on its own terms or was unceremoniously cancelled despite fan furor, the spinoff movies have been neither critically acclaimed nor particularly satisfying.

However, in many cases — think the recent Deadwood movie on HBO and Crave — they provide a sense of closure for fans left hanging by an untimely cancellation or just the joy of revisiting familiar characters (see the kind of dopey Gilmore Girls Netflix miniseries A Year in the Life).

Breaking Bad requires no such tying of loose ends. The AMC series ended just as Gilligan intended: with schoolteacher-turned-meth-maker Walter White (Bryan Cranston) bleeding out after rescuing his partner-in-crime, Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), from the Aryan Brotherhood gang that double-crossed him.

But that doesn’t mean anticipation isn’t feverish for the film, which seems to focus on Jesse’s life on the lam. After all, Gilligan has already shown he can successfully spin off from his original vision: Better Call Saul, his AMC series focusing on the origin story of Breaking Bad’s shyster lawyer Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) is an unqualified success.

Gilligan and his producers and actors have been diligent in protecting the secrecy surrounding the plot of El Camino during its time filming in Albuquerque, N.M. (a private jet was apparently used to fly in one notable actor to avoid detection) and the two-minute trailer reveals little. The writer did tell a radio show last week that Walter White is definitely dead, but that doesn’t mean Cranston won’t turn up in flashbacks or nightmares.

Rather than engage in fruitless speculation about El Camino, let’s look at TV-spinoff movies — the good, the bad, the mediocre and the mixed reviews.

The good: Serenity

Joss Whedon’s delightful 2002 space western Firefly perennially pops up in articles about shows that were cancelled too soon.

The sci-fi drama was titanically mishandled by Fox; the network refused to air the two-hour pilot, which obviously introduced all the characters and their relationships, and then also aired the remaining episodes out of order. The show, which starred Nathan Fillion, Gina Torres and Alan Tudyk as the renegade crew of a spaceship in the year 2517, was cancelled after only 11 of its 14 episodes had aired.

The fan response was swift. Though the show had poor ratings, it inspired passionate devotion; even before its cancellation, an Immediate Assistance campaign inundated Fox with support for the hour-long adventure. After it ended, fans used a postcard campaign to encourage UPN to pick up the show.

They weren’t successful, but their dedication inspired the series’ release on DVD in 2003; Universal Studios agreed to release a feature film in 2005.

Whedon — who, interestingly, pulled the reverse trick when he turned a lightweight movie into a long-lived, layered TV series with Buffy the Vampire Slayer — managed to create a film that could stand alone as a sci-fi feature but also give devotees the closure they desired (a tricky balance to achieve; the similarly fan-fuelled Veronica Mars movie achieved mostly the latter).

Critics agreed: “Taut, immersive, and alternately hilarious and heartbreaking, a well-balanced blend of whooping Wild West action and space opera,” wrote Tasha Robinson of the AV Club.

The bad: Sex and the City: The Movie; Sex and the City 2

Feh. The stars and writer/director of this influential six-season HBO series had the nerve to sully our memories of Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte not once, but twice.

The first movie, released in 2008, four years after the series ended, and imaginatively called Sex and the City: The Movie, saw relationship columnist Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) dithering over marriage to her elusive boyfriend Big (Chris Noth), while her NYC besties dealt with their own relationship crises.

In the New Yorker, Anthony Lane wrote: “I walked into the theatre hoping for a nice evening and came out as a hard-line Marxist, my head a whirl of closets, delusions and blunt-clawed cattiness. All the film lacks is a subtitle: The Lying, the Bitch and the Wardrobe.”

The Sex and the City movies were good for something, however: they did boffo box office, proving definitively that a film featuring a cast of women in their 40s and 50s could put bums in seats. The first film raked in a staggering $57 million in its opening weekend — at the time, the biggest opening for a romantic comedy and also for a film starring all women.

“As it turns out, the projected $30 million opening number did not do justice to the show’s rabid fan base of mostly women over the age of 25 (and their boyfriends and husbands who were looking to score some brownie points),” wrote Ron Hogan on the pop-culture website Den of Geek!.

The second instalment did not fare quite as well at the box office — only fair, since it’s truly terrible, an homage to unfettered consumerism instead of a love letter to our favourite ladies who lunch.

As sex-hungry Samantha (Kim Cattrall) famously said: “(Screw) me badly once, shame on you. (Screw) me badly twice, shame on me.”

The mediocre: Downton Abbey

This year’s return to the gentle escapades of the denizens of a grand British estate circa 1927 is possibly the least necessary spinoff movie ever. Not that fans won’t enjoy it — as comforting as a warm cuppa, it is — but the PBS series’ final episode in 2017 was entirely satisfying; reopening the saga of the Crawley family and their devoted servants seems like a money-driven proposition.

Downton Abbey the movie has all the hallmarks of the beloved British show by Julian Fellowes — which ran for six seasons — and most of the characters return for a story that revolves around a royal visit, but cramming all that intrigue and bickering and sentiment into two hours gives short shrift to every subplot and feels entirely too pat.

However, Dame Maggie Smith will not live forever, so any chance you get to see her deliver deliciously cutting remarks on the big screen as Dowager Countess Grantham is a chance worth taking.

Mixed reviews: Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

This prequel to the events of the groundbreaking TV series directed by David Lynch struck while the iron was hot in 1992, a year after the 1990 show was cancelled. The disturbing film, also written and directed by Lynch, was met with wildly varied reviews but mostly left a bad taste in the mouths of fans of the dark but quirky show (which was revived in 2017).

Viewers were already poised for disappointment after the daffy second season of the series, which lost momentum owing to Lynch’s departure, an increasingly ridiculous series of subplots and the sense of anticlimax after the murder of Laura Palmer was solved in Season 1.

Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly gave the prequel a C grade and wrote: “There have always been two sides to Lynch: the inscrutable, demonic prankster and the rhapsodic dreamer. In Fire Walk With Me, he’s at least trying to recover his poetic sincerity. If only his dreams weren’t starting to look like reruns.”

Meanwhile, Calum Marsh of the Village Voice doled out four stars to the film — which saw most of the main actors reprising their roles, but replaced Lara Flynn Boyle, who played Donna, with Moira Kelly, downplayed Kyle MacLachlan’s role as FBI Agent Dale Cooper and included a David Bowie cameo — and said: “In its own singular, deeply strange way, Fire Walk With Me is David Lynch’s masterpiece.”

The film was a box-office bomb in North America but in recent years it’s become a bit of a cult favourite — especially when viewed through the lens of the new season of Twin Peaks on Showtime/Crave, a far more twisted and troubling, Lynchian reiteration of the short-lived series.

jill.wilson@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @dedaumier

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