Breaking Bad, the five-season television saga that turned Mr. Chips into Scarface, is one of the most engaging and riveting drama series in recent memory. Many critics have called it the greatest TV show of all time. But, what’s surprising about Breaking Bad is its sense of humor. It has pathos and dramatic irony and shocking violence in spades, but it also has a healthy dose of dark comedy, which pairs well with its premise of ordinary people committing crimes—the juxtaposition alone is pretty funny.
Reservoir Dogs
The fact that Jesse’s last name is Pinkman, and he always refers to Walt as “Mr. White” has been seen as a sign that Vince Gilligan was heavily inspired by Quentin Tarantino’s indie debut feature Reservoir Dogs, in which all the characters are color-coded. It’s about a heist gone wrong, cutting from before the robbery to after the robbery without actually showing it.
The heist isn’t the focus of this heist movie. Instead, the focus is on the characters and their relationships. Since they’re pretty sure one of them is an undercover cop, they don’t know who to trust and it becomes a claustrophobic thriller.
Bottle Rocket
Wes Anderson’s feature directorial debut Bottle Rocket might be the quirkiest crime comedy ever made. The central hook in Breaking Bad was that it was a show about people who don’t know the first thing about crime getting involved in the world of crime. That’s exactly what happens in Bottle Rocket.
Luke Wilson is released from a mental institution and returns home to find his friend, played by his real-life brother Owen Wilson, is hellbent on going on a crime spree. What makes the movie such a hysterical gem is just how unprepared for a life of crime these guys are.
Catch Me If You Can
Steven Spielberg directed this hilarious retelling of the life of Frank Abagnale, Jr., the infamous con artist who convinced a hospital to hire him as a doctor, a law firm to hire him as a lawyer, and an airline to hire him as a pilot. He conned banks and corporations out of millions of dollars and always stayed one step ahead of the FBI. Leonardo DiCaprio played Abagnale, while Tom Hanks played the FBI agent on his tail. The cat-and-mouse dynamic that they develop is akin to that of Walter White and Hank Schrader—the perp is always right under the investigator’s nose.
Bad Santa
Bad Santa is sort of the opposite of Breaking Bad. In Breaking Bad, a good man takes a surrogate son under his wing during a life of crime and gradually, over time, becomes evil. In Bad Santa, a bad man takes a surrogate son under his wing during a life of crime and gradually, over time, becomes good-hearted.
Bad Santa stars Billy Bob Thornton as a mall Santa who, in partnership with his elf, robs malls every Christmas. However, when he befriends a young kid who is neglected by his parents enough to let a mall Santa stay in his house, he learns the value of caring about other people.
Horrible Bosses
The premise of Breaking Bad revolves around what happens when a completely normal person is given a little push into the criminal underworld. Horrible Bosses is a modern-day pastiche of Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train about three everymen (played by Jason Bateman, Charlie Day, and Jason Sudeikis) with bosses from hell—one who never delivers the promotions he promises, one who sexually harasses her employees, and one who spends the day snorting coke and firing people for trivial reasons—who decide to kill each other’s bosses. It’s not unlike chemistry teacher Walter White deciding to sell meth when he gets diagnosed with lung cancer.
Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels
Guy Ritchie’s directorial debut Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels has a few different intertwining storylines. In many ways, it was the British film industry’s response to Pulp Fiction; Love, Actually with guns. The plot revolves around a guy who loses a £500,000 bet to a ruthless crime boss in a rigged game of three-card brag and teams up with his friends to pay off his debts by robbing a small-time local gang. This is the movie that began the film careers of Jason Statham, who was then known as a diver, and Vinnie Jones, who was then known as a footballer.
Small Time Crooks
Woody Allen’s Small Time Crooks stars Allen as an ex-con who has a get-rich-quick scheme that’ll involve robbing a bank. The plan is simple enough: he and his wife will open up a muffin shop down the street from a bank, and, while the wife makes muffins and operates the shop as a front during the day, he and his cronies will tunnel to the bank through the basement.
In the end, they discover they’ve been reading the map upside down and end up tunneling the wrong way. Meanwhile, the muffin shop has been doing surprisingly good business, so they don’t really need to rob the bank anyway.
Get Shorty
This adaptation of the Elmore Leonard novel of the same name stars John Travolta as the mob fixer Chili Palmer, who takes a job in L.A. and decides to become a movie producer when he realizes Hollywood isn’t so different from the criminal underworld he left behind.
Since the protagonist is a criminal antihero and the antagonists range from more deplorable criminals to people who have never committed a crime in their lives, Get Shorty has a similar cast of characters to Breaking Bad, while its zany, comedic tone mixed with violence and bad tempers is in line with AMC’s meth-addled drama.
In Bruges
One of the main themes in Breaking Bad is morality, as the mild-mannered Walter White is pushed to his ethical limits on the path to becoming ruthless drug kingpin Heisenberg. Martin McDonagh’s darkly comic directorial debut In Bruges is all about morality. Some viewers have even read the titular Belgian city as a metaphor for limbo, as it’s where hitmen Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson are sent to await judgment after a job gone wrong.
It’s such a randomly selected, unimpressive, mediocre location that the characters are forced to do some serious soul-searching. There’s also plenty of grim hilarity along the way.
Fargo
The Coen brothers’ pitch-black crime comedy Fargo is the kind of movie that cinema was invented for. It has a tight plot, a great cast of characters, and breathtaking cinematography by Roger Deakins. Fargo tells the story of an insurance salesman who plans to bilk his wealthy yet stingy father-in-law out of some cash by hiring a couple of goons to kidnap his wife and hold her for a ransom.
Meanwhile, a pregnant cop takes on the case and starts to piece it together. The complicated ethics of each character, as well as the many surprising plot twists, make this a must-see for fans of Breaking Bad.
