El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (2019)

Aaron Paul is incredible,, 11 October 2019

I’m not going to go into any real plot details so as not to spoil the ending of Breaking Bad.  Instead, I’ll just say that El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (or just El Camino for the rest of this) tells Jesse Pinkman’s story immediately following the events in the series finale.  

The thing I absolutely loved about El Camino was seeing Aaron Paul play Jesse Pinkman one more time.  I thought he was good in the series - as good as Bryan Cranston - but here, he takes his acting up a notch.  Watching him play the beaten and frightened Jesse, it’s truly amazing. I could almost feel the pain Jesse was going through.  Paul doesn’t even speak much for a big hunk of the first part of the movie, but he’s still able to express his feelings quite clearly.  It’s really an acting masterclass from Paul.

The plot is okay.  It’s a very slow moving film with just a couple of action set-pieces to break up the drama.  But while it may be slow, it ever feels like a long movie. It’s about the fastest 2+ hours I’ve spent watching a movie recently.  When the action does come, it’s expertly handled just as you’d expect from Vince Gilligan. And the ending is perfect. Gilligan fittingly wraps up Jesse’s story as neat and tidy as you could hope. 

My main complaint is that El Camino never really feels like the big movie I was hoping for.  Not that that’s a bad thing, but I expected more. Breaking Bad told a larger than life story with outlandish characters, incredible dialogue, over-the-top violence, and amazing plot twists.  El Camino, in comparison, is much more laid back and doesn’t feature a lot of the elements that I loved in the show.  

The other thing that bothered me about El Camino was all the fan service.  Other than Jesse, all of the other characters / actors have little more than cameos.  It was nice to see some of them again, but a lot of them don’t do much. 

6/10