Movie Review : El Camino - A Breaking Bad Movie (2019)
Breaking Bad is a television show about a chemistry teacher turned meth dealer that ran on AMC from 2008 to 2013. It is widely considered to be one of the best thing to ever grace a television screen. I personally love it. The show managed to break every rule of television while remaining noticeably better than shows that followed the formula. That’s why I was dubious when El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie was announced. Why would showrunner Vince Gilligan want to reopen something that was perfect? Did Jesse Pinkman hypothetically deserve redemption?
El Camino doesn’t provide much of an answer to both questions, but it manages to reignite the fire for a couple scenes and make the viewing experience worthwhile. It’s kind of like watching the show, but not really.
So, what is El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie about, right? It starts right where the show left off, with Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) escaping the white supremacists compound onboard the titular El Camino. In case you don’t remember, they were keeping him hostage and forced him to cook meth for most of season 5. El Camino is the story of Jesse’s quest for a new beginning. If he wants it to happen, he’ll need two things: Todd (Jesse Plemons)’s hidden stack of money and a little luck with the law. But Jesse always pays a unfairly high price to get what he wants.
Let’s be honest here. El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie was like eating a criminally undercooked version of your favorite meal, wasn’t it?
I mean, it’s not a bad movie. It’s taut, atmospheric and offers a handful of the trademark awkward scenes that made Breaking Bad so enjoyable. But it doesn’t have much to say. Jesse did exactly what you would expect him to do in this situation. Hell, he does what every smart fictional criminal would. Pseudo-spoiler: there’s no Breaking Bad-esque fate that awaits Jesse. Did we really need to know what happened to him after leaving the white supremacist compound? Not if it didn’t fit the greater portrait of Breaking Bad’s legacy and El Camino definitely doesn’t.
I’ll give something to El Camino: it understands why people loved the show so much. It was the show about drug dealers that didn’t want to make you become one. The one that you watched with the same breed of trainwreck fascination that you’d watch reality television with. It’s an exercise in discomfort for the characters and the audience both. Criminal and outlaw behavior has been romanticized in Western fiction since the post-war and I had forgotten how good it felt to watch someone clumsily surviving life or death situations the way I would in his situation.
It feels real in a very awkward way and in a couple scenes, El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie lives up to this unique legacy.
The most Breaking Bad scene I can think of is Jesse finding a gun in Todd’s car and being too psychologically and emotionally beaten to use it against him. There’s also one of the most ugly and brutal shootout between Jesse and opportunistic bandits that was a delightful throwback to old days. The magic is definitely there, but only in fragments. El Camino is an epilogue for a series that didn’t need one. Speeding into an unknown future while uncontrollably laughing and crying was a perfect ending for Jesse Pinkman and it isn’t his ending anymore.
El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie is a decent movie that shouldn’t exist. I mean, it would’ve been an unmemorable getaway film on its own and it relies way too much on the show nostalgia to stand out. Half of the movie is built from flashback scenes that happened in season 5 because there’s just not that much going on in real time, for Jesse. There are some fun scenes. It’s inherently competent, but it’s more sappy fan service than a new entry in one of the most subversive shows in television history and THAT is a very un-Breaking Bad thing to do.
Do not fuck with excellence.
6.6/10
