Tight zooms straight into the barrel of a gun. Credit, too, to Gilligan, who settles back into his filmmaking rhythm (he directed the series’ finale and pilot, along with three other essential episodes) and recaptures the Breaking Bad look: Sun-baked frames of New Mexico. He vibrates with intensity, a frayed nerve conveying Jesse’s trauma in practically every scene. (It also helps that Paul, with minimal makeup and clever costuming, looks like he’s barely aged since Breaking Bad went off-air.) The film, for all its guest stars, relies on Paul to carry it-and the actor proves himself more than up to the challenge. These chapters deliver the signature Breaking Bad tension, slow burning before the twist is revealed, the stakes are established, and the (often bloody) pieces fall into place.Īaron Paul is phenomenal, deftly toggling between Jesse’s youthful playfulness and his older, emotionally shattered world-weariness from scene to scene. (One particularly sinister figure I’d hoped never to see again resurfaces to surprisingly hilarious effect-hilarious in the grisly-gallows-humor sense.) To that end, El Camino feels episodic, with each character taking Jesse on a short-story-like detour before leading him onto the next step of his journey. These peeks into Jesse’s past inform his present-day decisions-and give Breaking Bad fans a chance to catch up with a litany of familiar faces. Thankfully, the film is interested in observing Jesse’s journey as a whole, splicing his new circumstances as a fugitive with extensive flashbacks. This is bleak emotional territory for a character who once served as the series’ moral center and comic relief. That plan leads him into a nesting doll of precarious situations-one problem begets another, and as he deals with every new threat, Jesse begins to question whether he deserves a second chance at all. Wanted by the authorities and plagued by PTSD, Jesse attempts to dispose of the titular vehicle he’d used to escape and, after a brief meet-up with his old cronies Badger (Matthew Lee Jones) and Skinny Pete (Charles Baker), concocts a plan to leave Albuquerque for good. It’s an image that El Camino promptly rejects: In the immediate aftermath of his exit, Jesse, as the only survivor of Walt’s massacre, has merely waded into more danger.
El camino a breaking bad movie review series#
When Jesse drove out of his captors’ compound during the series finale, he screamed with relief and joy, an image that implied a happy ending. In the final stretch of episodes, Walt abandoned Jesse to be abducted by a drug-dealing neo-Nazi gang, who kept him in a cage and enslaved him as a meth cook. The film is a visceral, ruminative, and emotionally satisfying epilogue in which the broken Jesse reconciles with his past and searches for the hope and humanity he’d lost-or, rather, been denied by Walt. El Camino, out today, lives up to Breaking Bad’s legacy of propulsive storytelling. The news raised an obvious question: Is it worth continuing a story that already had such a definitive ending? Yet six years, 16 Emmys, and one spin-off prequel later, Netflix announced it would release El Camino, a film sequel written and directed by Gilligan that would follow the journey of Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), Walt’s meth-cooking, bitch-uttering partner in crime. “Sometimes unanswered questions are good, but in this case, this being such a finite and closed-ended show, we needed resolution.” “We knew we needed to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s,” explained the show’s creator, Vince Gilligan, moments after the finale aired in 2013. The AMC drama set in New Mexico about Walter White (Bryan Cranston), a milquetoast high-school chemistry teacher who decays into a morally bankrupt drug kingpin, tied up every loose end in its last hour. In an era of controversial series finales, Breaking Bad was the rare show to stick the landing. This review contains light spoilers for El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie and major spoilers for the Breaking Bad series.
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