‘BREAKING BAD’ COOKS UP A SOLID SEQUEL
El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie is not exactly the follow-up movie that the world was waiting for, ever since Walter White (Bryan Cranston) died on a meth lab concrete floor and his cooking partner, Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), fled from neo-Nazi captors in the aforementioned muscle car at the end of Breaking Bad in 2013. But it bears all the signature stylistic moves of its creator, Vince Gilligan — not surprising, since he wrote and directed El Camino. And it’s solidly entertaining, if you miss all the contrivances, characters and nuances of Gilligan’s peculiar universe.
Back for repeat business is Paul, a bit more bloated, older and aged than his character was in the Breaking Bad finale — after all, being tortured and caged by neoNazis and forced to cook meth while chained to a zipline will tend to age a body. Then there’s Jesse Plemons, playing Todd, the very picture of banal evil (and now a bit more dad-bod than his earlier, younger character) as he enlists the captive Pinkman, in flashback, to help remove a certain cleaning lady’s decomposing body from his pastel-toned apartment.
Also back for business — again, in flashback — are
Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks), the drug henchman who mentored Jesse; comic relief drug dealers Skinny Pete and Badger (Charles Baker and Matt Jones), enlisted to get rid of the El Camino that Pinkman escaped in; plus there’s Krysten Ritter as Jane, Jesse’s old girlfriend who died of an overdose (with a cold-blooded assist from Walter White); and the late Robert Forster, in his final role, returning as Ed, a methodical man who helps people “disappear” for the right amount of cash. And — oh, yes — there’s a flashback appearance from that former Alberquerque high school chemistry teacher turned meth kingpin himself, in a brief postlude.
All of this adds fun grist to a kind of jumpedup revenge tale, with convolutions aplenty — Jesse needs money to give to Ed, so he can escape the Feds, the police, the Mexican drug cartels and remaining neo-Nazis, presumably — but mostly to escape his past life, which, as we see from Paul’s very central performance, has changed him in ways that Walter White never imagined, or even bothered to care about.
Jesse Pinkman was always the ethical barometer of Breaking Bad, even as he was dragged by White deeper and deeper into the matrix of lies, betrayal, murder and moral corruption necessary for survival. Jesse didn’t start out baldheaded — Breaking Bad’s code for bad-ass evil — but by season three, he’s down to a buzz cut, even as Walter White is already clean-scalped, wearing a black hat and going by the moniker “Heisenberg.”
In the two-hour El Camino (Spanish for “the road”), Pinkman has to settle some debts, ruminate over his mistakes and overcome a certain squeamishness before coming back, guns ablazing, to reclaim his own identity and pathway back to the road ahead.
In this sense, El Camino is definitely a western, from the straight-up pistol duel with the owner of a welding company who did very, very bad things to ensure Jesse’s captivity, to the scene where Jesse’s taking a bath (who takes a bath, post-1880?), presumably to cleanse the last round of killing from his soul.
One character who is not included in this reunion is Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk), who has his own Breaking Bad spinoff franchise on Netflix called Better Call Saul (a fine show for those with loads of patience). But El Camino borrows some of that show’s leisurely pace, which can be a mixed blessing at times. The movie has sporadic outbursts of action, and in those moments, we’re back there, where each new episode of Breaking Bad was something alive and revelatory, because Vince Gilligan was making up the rules as he went along.
Yet El Camino, for all its slower pace, is really about granting Jesse Pinkman the sort of life and freedom that he was denied in all his years locked in partnership with Walter White. The two characters who offer him advice are the flashback Jane (who reminds Jesse of the importance of choosing your own destiny), and Walter himself, shortly after one of the duo’s more grueling four-day cooking sessions in Season 2. In that flashback, Walter sits with Jesse in a diner, offering the kind of glass-halffull pep talk that he would dole out to any high school student trying to pick a future career. It’s a hilarious bit of dialogue ending with Walter growing reflective, telling Jesse: “You know, you’re really lucky. You didn’t have to wait your whole life to do something special.”
But Pinkman’s not really buying it; he knows how much has been lost, how much things have cost — not just him, but those around him — due to his choices. At that point, Jesse Pinkman’s not looking for “something special”; he looks about ready to settle for a clean slate. (Watch on Netflix.)