[Generic SPOILER warning for anyone who hasn’t seen Breaking Bad yet, which if not, please go do that ASAP, because, you know, it’s one of the 5 best TV shows ever created…]
Apparently this is the year we decided to resurrect FLAWLESS previous studio IP in hopes to recreate the magic. Toy Story 4, while not as good as my 3rd favorite movie of all time, managed to do more right then wrong, and proved a fitting cap on one of the great movie franchises. And now comes El Camino, hoping to capture that Breaking Bad magic. Though it was never going to be as deep and breathtaking as the TV Series, El Camino, like Toy Story 4, puts a nice cap on the franchise that should satisfy fans of the series. In addition, Vince Gilligan and Aaron Paul manage to capture what made the series special, while telling a wholly brand new, different story.
Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), now freed from his Nazi prison, drives away in his El Camino. Quickly, he realizes that the police will be looking for him because of the scene left behind. Ergo, he drives to his friends Badger (Matt Jones) and Skinny Pete’s (Charles Barker) house. From there, Jesse collects himself, goes through his past memories of shady dealings, and tries to figure out what to do with the rest of his life, while evading the police.
Vince Gilligan is a smart man; he’s not going to just run back Breaking Bad. He does at this point, know the essence of the show though, and that’s what makes El Camino pop. We know we’re getting great epic shots of the Albuquerque desert: that’s a given. The stillness with which the movie is shot teeters on the verge of boring the audience, but it gives El Camino a deliberate pace that helps the audience laser focus in when the story gets going. The greatest joys in the movie rely on the specificity and built in humor of amateur criminals criminaling. When trying to hide the El Camino, for example, they knock over a basketball hoop. Some of the flashbacks to Jesse’s meth cooking days see him helping out with some task, like removing a dead body. And watching these criminals fumble through rolling a body in a rug, or making small talk doing something so vile, can’t help but make you chuckle a bit. In a bad director’s hands, this strategy would undercut the movie. In Gilligan’s hands, its the driving momentum that releases some tension and completely grounds the movie in reality.
Being a plot driven movie like El Camino, the movie doesn’t try to heavily to insert overt, epic themes into the film, mostly because unlike a TV show the movie doesn’t have time for that. Instead, Gilligan builds the whole story around Jesse’s character arc. When we first see him, Jesse is free, but a VERY broken man. He has fits of PTSD from his time in prison, and in flashbacks we see how much of shell he had become in simple and effective ways. Jesse was always a great character on the show, but rarely does he get a chance to do things for himself, usually working at the bidding of others. This movie subtly hints about how he can create his own fresh start. Whether it be opportunities lost, or people who cared about him encouraging him to do so, Jesse slowly breaks out of his shell, and pushes himself to be his own man, going out on his terms, yea bitch!
Rest easy, Breaking Bad fans. Vince Gilligan was never going to ruin your feelings about his perfect show. He merely thought he’d put a Downton Abbey like stamp on his series. And due to unfortunate events this week, he might have also given a great swansong to a great actor at the same time.