Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
When we left Walter White and Jesse Pinkman at the end of Breaking Bad, Walt was dying just after springing Jesse from the clutches of a drug gang who was making him cook meth. Jesse was driving away in an El Camino, screaming in response to his traumatic time in captivity. So Walt got a conclusion but Jesse never did. Vince Gilligan has decided to rectify that with El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie. Read on for more…
EL CAMINO: A BREAKING BAD MOVIE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: We open with Jessie Pinkman (Aaron Paul), at some point before where we leave him in the Breaking Bad finale, getting advice from Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks), where he should go when he’s done with his adventures cooking meth. “Alaska,” is what Mike tells him.
We then cut to a shaggy, bearded Jesse, escaping the drug den owned by the gang led by Todd Alquist’s (Jesse Plemons) uncle, speeding away in Todd’s El Camino after being sprung from his cell by none other than Walter White (Bryan Cranston, of course, but we don’t see a replay of that scene). So we pick right up from where the BB finale ended.
He eventually makes it to the house of his buddies Badger (Matt Jones) and Skinny Pete (Charles Baker), who help him hide. He rests up, showers and shaves, and after a failed first attempt at getting rid of the El Camino — police are looking for Jesse as a “person of interest” in the mass shooting of the gang via Walt’s remote-controlled machine-gun contraption — Skinny Pete comes up with a great plan to throw the cops off. Jesse takes Badger’s Fiero; he’s got something he needs to take care of.
Flashing back to a time when Todd let Jesse out of his cage just long enough to “take care of something” at his well-appointed apartment, Jesse knows that there’s a ton of money hidden somewhere in that place. He goes there and tears the place apart. His goal? He wants Ed (Robert Forster), the man who helped Walt disappear in the finale and was supposed to help Jesse do the same, to complete the transaction. But things aren’t quite that simple, either with getting the money or retaining Ed’s services. Is it ever simple in the Breaking Bad universe?
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The entire run of Breaking Bad. Vince Gilligan, who wrote and directed El Camino,uses the same cinematic style, wry sense of humor, and expert tension-building he used on the original series.
Performance Worth Watching: Aaron Paul is in virtually every scene, he has to show the wide range of emotions Jesse has gone through over the past few years, from the defeated Jesse that was being held by the gang, to the Jesse determined to escape his old life and start anew, to even the hopeful, bro-ish Jesse during the early days of his collaboration with Walt (yes, there are flashbacks to that time, with a couple of big cameos during those flashbacks). Paul pulls it off easily, slipping back into Jesse’s tortured shoes as if there never was a six year gap between the BB finale and El Camino.
Memorable Dialogue: Jesse, in an attempt to gain access to his parents’ home, calls them (Tess Harper, Michael Bofshever) in order to get them out of the house. He concludes the call by saying, “I don’t know if it’ll mean much to you, but you did your best. Whatever happened to me, it’s on me, OK? No one else.”
Sex and Skin: Nothing.
Our Take: It was going to be pretty much a given that Gilligan was going to makeEl Camino feel like a continuation of his Breaking Bad / Better Call Saul opus. Both shows had a cinematic look, with lots of scenery and long shots, and effects that you tend not to see on TV dramas. So none of that changed for this feature, which will be released in a limited number of theaters along with its Netflix premiere. But the big thing we were wondering going in was just how much we were going to see of the rest of the BB universe during the story.
What we appreciated is that Gilligan gave us what he promised, which was a conclusion to Jesse’s story. While we see cameos of lots of Breaking Badpeople, including Cranston and Krysten Ritter in flashbacks, they are just there to service Jesse’s desire to leave the past behind and start a new life. To that end, Gilligan focuses on the things Jesse has to go through in order to do that, including what he has to do to get the last $1800 to get Ed get him a new identity.
We weren’t promised that all loose ends would be tied up, and we don’t get flashbacks involving Saul Goodman, Gus Fring or a number of other major BB characters. We get Jesse’s quest to escape, and because of that, the story plays out in a very satisfying way. Yes, there’s all sorts of complications thrown in Jesse’s way, sort of like what you might see in a caper film. But, like we said earlier, that’s basically what Gilligan and his writers have done all along on BB and Saul: How can we take a simple situation and make it infinitely complicated for the show’s main characters? It’s a simple formula, but it works, and it works on El Camino.
Do we have quibbles? Sure. A little Badger and Skinny Pete goes a long way, and we got more than a little of both at the beginning of the film. Same with Todd; Gilligan and company leaned a little too heavily on the manchild character during the last season of BB, and we see too much of him here, though the way he talks about murder with such an innocent air is always funny.
Our Call: STREAM IT. El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie does a great job of closing out Jesse’s story, which was left hanging in the BB finale. And Aaron Paul is more than capable of carrying a BBstory. And to think, Jesse was supposed to die in Breaking Bad‘s first season…
Your Call:
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon,VanityFair.com,Playboy.com, FastCompany.com,RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.
