IN PURSUIT OF PINKMAN
Thanks to Breaking Bad followup film, fans now know what happened to Jesse
El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie Netflix
What it comes down to is this: Is Jesse Pinkman better off in our imaginations, peeling away with a cathartic howl of freedom in that Chevy El Camino during Breaking Bad’s bullet-ridden final episode six years ago?
Or is he better off if we find out just a little more, as we do in creator Vince Gilligan’s El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie, a twohour Netflix coda that mostly serves to remind fans that there will never be another show quite like Breaking Bad?
Satisfying in almost every way that matters, El Camino picks up exactly where that finale left off. Jesse (Aaron Paul, in the role he was born to play) escapes the attack on the meth compound that was engineered by a vengeful Walter White (Bryan Cranston).
Rather than drive off into the New Mexico sunrise, Jesse flees to the Albuquerque home of Skinny Pete and Badger (Charles Baker and Matt Jones) who help him hide the El Camino, give him food and shelter and, the next morning, devise Jesse’s run for the border in a far less cool mode of transport: A Pontiac Fiero.
When Jesse tries to stammer out his gratitude, Skinny Pete won’t have it: “Dude,” he says, “You’re my hero and s---.”
Suffice to say that Jesse is very much that to all of us who loved the original show, serving as Breaking Bad’s unlikely moral centre — a key piece in a prolonged saga about the darkness within. Paul’s Emmy-winning performance remains a singular, heartbreaking achievement; Jesse was and still is the unluckiest lucky one, destined to pay the biggest price for his own transgressions, as well as the sins of others.
As such, Gilligan, who always loved to trap his characters in the most desperate situations, isn’t about to let Jesse have an easy escape from Albuquerque. First of all, he’s a broken man, after months of torture and slave labour.
El Camino opens with the ominous idea that this Ptsd-ridden Jesse might be all that’s left, a shell of what he was.
But Jesse comes through, as he always has.
Amid a massive citywide manhunt, Gilligan has written and directed one more of his superbly reverse-engineered scripts, where separate tracks of tension and anxiety are micromanaged to a degree of precision that anyone should expect from a project with Breaking Bad in the title.
Knowing that he lacks the skill to elude federal authorities, Jesse turns to another shadow figure in the Breaking Bad universe, Ed Galbraith (Robert Forster), the vacuum-repair shop owner also known as the Disappearer, whose services don’t come cheap. Ed is none too pleased to see Jesse and offers little in the way of help or sympathy. The soft-spoken Forster died of brain cancer the day El Camino premièred.
Most of El Camino’s meaty middle hinges on how Jesse will scrape up the sort of cash it will take to purchase Ed’s help. While flashbacks have become a narrative crutch in the peaktv era, Gilligan reminds us that he’s a master of them, conjuring up a long sequence from the past that brings back the polite, ginger-haired demon known as Todd Alquist (Jesse Plemons).
El Camino isn’t sparing with the Breaking Bad cameos and connectivity, including a flashback in which Cranston briefly reprises his role as the late Walter.
The film also delivers a good dose of dark humour, such as when Plemons’ Todd casually sings along to Dr. Hook’s 1978 hit Sharing the Night Together while driving on a gruesome errand. And as far as conclusions go, El Camino certainly has one — bullets flying, a big explosion, and a whiff of catharsis.
All El Camino lacks, really, is just a little more about Jesse himself — so beloved for his “yos” yet so often mute on his deepest feelings.
We need a scene that better conveys the man’s essence; not a grand “I am the one who knocks”-style monologue, perhaps, but more than just his fear and angst.
Mostly this film — Netflix calls it “a television event,” but has also released it in some theatres — reminds us that a lot of television shows and movies reach for what Breaking Bad was so good at doing, and still come up short.