El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie- Review
Originally published in Trinity Film Review, 2020
Breaking Bad is far from a story that lacked an ending, but somehow Vince Gilligan made his six-year-late coda El Camino feel like a natural, sincere send-off to his series, as well as a satisfying film in its own right.
With pretty much the entire cast and crew populated by returning faces from the series, El Camino is as much a reunion for the Breaking Bad crew as it is for the audience. Serving not only as the series’ showrunner and creator but as director of several key episodes, Gilligan was far from an unfamiliar choice to take the helm of the sequel film. There’s certainly a certain ‘cinematic’ weight to the film, with a noticeably bigger budget and a far more mature, relaxed pace, but he stays true to the frenetic editing and iconic POV shots that defined the visual style of Breaking Bad. In truth, the film feels just like a two-hour episode of the series, and that is by no means a bad thing- Gilligan brings the audience right back into the world he so carefully crafted and pulls them out just as quick.
Aaron Paul leads the film as Jesse Pinkman, a character who was originally supposed to exit the series within the first season, but Paul’s charisma made him a series mainstay to the very end. I can’t say how narratively comprehensible the film would be to those who never followed his journey through the five seasons of Breaking Bad, but El Camino at least makes some effort to thematically ground its events with flashbacks to key characters and formative moments for Jesse, giving audience members new and old an idea of how he got to where he is. Paul slips right back into the character after the six-year break, delivering an impressively understated and varied performance between the film’s non-linear flashbacks of a boisterous young teen, a broken prisoner and the liberated, humbled man we pick up with moments after the series’ conclusion. He’s backed up by returning cast members both expected and unexpected, including a characteristically stoic and commanding performance and a retroactively tragic send-off to Robert Forster, who passed away the same day the film released.
From a narrative standpoint, the film is fairly simple; the series’ jump to film hasn’t prompted any sort of escalation to a bombastic action franchise; the focus remains on the consequences and aftermath of grounded, believable crime and personal corruption. Visually and narratively Gilligan draws most clearly from classic Western anti-heroes, making a slow, tense, contemplative drama building to a quiet, personal stand-off. The seedy underworld of small-town America that Gilligan has so diligently laid out through Breaking Bad, its spin-off prequel series Better Call Saul, and now El Camino feels akin to a modern Wild West; every ‘good guy’ is an outlaw, and all we can really hope for them is that they lay down their weapons and find peace. Jesse isn’t a hero, he’s just the best of a bad bunch- it’s left completely to the audience to reflect on whether he has been or even can be redeemed.
The film leaves us with no big revelations or twist endings- in fact, by its finale, the story is left almost exactly where it picked up. El Camino isn’t supposed to be an earth-shattering thriller or the revenge porn fantasy it might seem like it’s setting up; it’s a quiet, reflective film about crime, guilt and redemption, but mostly it’s a fitting tribute and touching epilogue to one of television’s greatest stories.