El Camino: A Breaking Bad Story is fan service executed at a very high level

Vulture

The Netflix movie follow-up to Breaking Bad revolving around Aaron Paul's Jesse Pinkman is "an attempt to answer the perennial child’s bedtime-story question, 'And then what happened?' after the words 'The End' have already been pronounced and the parent has reached for the light switch," says Matt Zoller Seitz. "It seems iffy to describe a work dependent on thorough knowledge of the original series as a standalone, and El Camino definitely ain’t it. Like the Deadwood and Transparent wrap-ups that also debuted in 2019, it’s doing something different from its previously established norm, and yet it’s still tethered to the mothership show, without which all of the character turns and callbacks would be meaningless. There’s just enough context provided to get invested in Jesse’s story without having seen a frame of Breaking Bad, but who would want to do a thing like that? Ultimately this is extra episodes of the series in a fresh stylistic wrapper, with scenes every 42 minutes or so that could serve as makeshift cliffhangers if one were to break this 125-minute tale into thirds. Between the fanboy-ready cameos by major players and supporting characters, most of whom were bumped off in the series’ regular run ... and its callbacks to signature moments ... El Camino could’ve been an official Comic Con co-production."

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• El Camino doesn't live up to Breaking Bad's lofty standards and proves Jesse Pinkman isn't as interesting without Walter White: "Nothing and no one lights up the screen as (Aaron) Paul and (Bryan) Cranston did during the show’s five-season run," says Lorraine Ali. "Maybe it’s not fair to expect such brilliance. Then again, it wasn’t a great decision to tack a new ending onto a powerful saga that paired working-class desperation with American ingenuity. What’s left are the trials of the hapless former drug dealer and burner who has no one of import to turn to for help. Plagued by flashbacks and terrified by what comes next, the wanted fugitive Pinkman spends a great deal of time hiding, fretting and bumping into minor characters from the series. Fans may get a kick out of revisiting old haunts and reconnecting with familiar faces, at least one of whom made the jump from Breaking Bad to the brilliant spinoff, Better Call Saul. However, there aren’t enough of those reunions, at least with key figures, to gird a strong, compelling tale that connects past with present."
• El Camino avoids the pitfalls of Deadwood: The Movie, the Downton Abbey film and Transparent Musicale Finale: "Aside from a few unnecessary character cameos, most of which you could easily guess but none of which I will spoil here, El Camino avoids the pitfalls of this year’s many feature-length sequels to TV shows," says Judy Berman. "There’s little of the fan-service inanity that abounded in the Downton Abbey film and none of the sentimental self-indulgence of Transparent’s insufferable musical finale. Like AMC’s Breaking Bad prequel Better Call Saul, as well as morally flexible saloon owner Al Swearengen’s (Ian McShane) storyline in HBO’s Deadwood: The Movie, it completes the unfinished portrait of a character who remains on viewers’ minds. There’s a unique potency to the connections we form with the fictional people on TV, which at its best combines the vividness of movies, the intimacy of books and the seriality of comics. Sometimes we remember them with the same wistfulness that colors our memories of friends with whom we’ve lost touch. That goes double for Jesse Pinkman, an audience surrogate who served as the tortured conscience of a criminal demimonde populated by milquetoast psychos (Walt, Todd, Gus Fring) and sad, irredeemably compromised men like Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) and Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks)."
• It's fun and thrilling, but never feels necessary: "El Camino is a high-quality piece of suspense and action filmmaking carried by Paul's still-tremendous performance as Jesse Pinkman," says Daniel Fienberg. "It looks great, sounds great and if you're a fan, it's full of cameos and references that are sure to amuse. It's also — and this is not an insignificant problem — largely unnecessary as it pertains to the larger Breaking Bad narrative. At least it's unnecessary in an innocuous and entertaining way. It doesn't do any harm. It just gives answers I'm not sure I cared about to questions I'm not sure I asked."
• El Camino is exactly what you'd expect from a Breaking Bad episode: "Gilligan walks Jesse through a gantlet of frying pans and fires, a series of break-ins and double-crosses as tense and seamless as any Breaking Bad caper," says James Poniewozik. "But that’s the thing: They’re almost exactly what you’d expect from a Breaking Bad episode, except more drawn-out. A series that popularized the idea of TV as 'cinematic' — spectacular in visual scale, adept with surprising imagery and montage — has produced an actual film that plays like an extended TV episode."
• Vince Gilligan uses Jesse’s scramble to freedom as something of a corrective to Breaking Bad’s Walt-centric endgame: "Paul is in virtually every scene, and Gilligan constructs the film in a way that fills in a lot of narrative and emotional blanks about periods on Breaking Bad where Jesse’s story again became subordinate to Walt’s," says Alan Sepinwall. "If the BB conclusion had a flaw — beyond the question of whether you think it should have ended with Walt riding away in Ed the disappearer’s van in 'Ozymandias,' or continued on to him killing the Nazis and rescuing Jesse in 'Felina' — it’s that Jesse got left behind a bit. By the end of El Camino, that’s no longer the case. And that’s as much a justification for the movie’s existence as the sheer craft on display, as always, by Gilligan and his collaborators."
• El Camino works best when it attempts to right the Breaking Bad finale’s moral wrongs: "Gilligan gave Walt’s tale a tidy ending, one in which he died on his own terms after defeating his enemies," says Shirley Li. "But Walt—a monster who destroyed his family, poisoned children, and ordered Jesse’s death—was never brought to justice. Jesse, on the other hand, was compassionate, but always uncertain of his decency...If the Breaking Bad finale was about a monster getting what he wanted, El Camino is about a conflicted man who once thought he had no future learning to build one again. The former made for a neat closure; the latter provides a more open, pensive end."
• El Camino is justified simply because it gives Jesse's character closure: "If there is a reason El Camino exists—other than because people are, like, really into Breaking Bad—it isn’t just to provide closure to Jesse’s arc with a definitive epilogue, it’s to serve as a litmus test for Jesse himself, and whether he’s capable of mending his soul and moving on with his life after everything he’s done and endured," says Miles Surrey. "Walt’s chapter might be closed—and don’t worry, the movie assures everyone that Walt is actually dead—but Jesse’s story at the start of El Camino is still being written. And what 'everything' entails is at the crux of El Camino, which combines its present-day narrative of Jesse trying to get the hell out of New Mexico with some contextual flashbacks of Jesse’s time spent in captivity."
• El Camino mainly just fills space, and likely time – something Breaking Bad never did: "Unlike the brilliance that was so much of the multiple Emmy winning series’ five season run on AMC, El Camino is a half measure sequel, to paraphrase Jonathan Banks’ Mike Ehrmantraut in that pivotal twelfth episode of Season 3 of Breaking Bad," says Dominic Patten. "It’s not that El Camino is bad, it’s not. The Vince Gilligan penned and directed project is actually worse than that in many ways. It’s worse because it neither sucks nor soars."
• El Camino is constructed like one long TV episode: "The film follows an interesting structure, and one that contradicts the impression given by some of the pre-release marketing," says Paul MacInnes. "Gilligan – who reprises his own role as writer and director – has always been good at keeping his audience on their toes. His penchant for bravura cinematography is on display once again, with one time-lapse sequence featuring eight Jesses creeping around a house proving a standout moment. But while it has both style and content, El Camino feels more like a feature-length TV episode than an actual movie. It is too compact and fragmented to truly stand on its own, and viewers who have not seen the preceding 62 hours of Breaking Bad will likely struggle to enjoy it. That El Camino is a Netflix production – set to be released on the streaming giant today with only a smattering of cinema screenings (and none in the UK) – might explain this construction."
• Aaron Paul impressively juggles multiple eras of Pinkmania: “'Yeah, bitch!'-ing meth student, wuvvy romantic, wrecking ball of soul-scabbed vengeance," says Darren Franich. "And god, Gilligan loves this milieu: paranoid pastel catalog apartments, plain-sight master criminals sincerely dedicated to their shell-company chicken shacks and vacuum dens. The most tense sequence in El Camino depends on the gabby old kook from down the hall ever-so-slowly watering plants with a plastic spray bottle."
• Even with an unsurprisingly emotionally complex lead performance from Paul, El Camino can’t help but feel unnecessary and overlong: "Where El Camino struggles is in the nagging sense that it has no business being two hours long, because there’s not nearly enough reason to expand a fairly brief, tense adventure into feature length," says Josh Spiegel. "The show often received comparisons to Westerns (which may make some cinephiles blanche), and El Camino steers right into those comparisons; one of its setpieces invokes the Western trope to end all Western tropes, all but demanding to be considered alongside neo-Westerns like Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West. It’s a fine aim for any film to strive for, but one El Camino arguably doesn’t earn. Where Leone could fill the space of his wide screen with sweaty men, close-ups of their straining eyes, and elongate tension by seeming to slow down every tete-a-tete, El Camino has the air of just killing time."
• El Camino keeps one foot planted in serialized television, another in cinematic one-offs: "Of course, the filmmaking on Breaking Bad was plenty ambitious to start with, so it’s not like Gilligan, cinematographer Marshall Adams, and editor Skip Macdonald have great leaps to make in order to elevate their POV shots and whiplash time jumps to the level of something grander," says Erik Adams. "Refreshingly, Gilligan doesn’t try to run away from his TV-writing instincts: Each proceeding stage in Jesse’s high-stakes predicament plays out like its own distinct episode, a further blurring of the lines between media that might’ve been distracting in a bygone era, but is right at home on Netflix. Every '10-hour movie' on the service could learn a thing or two from the way these tautly strung together incidents nudge Jesse into and out of the various traps left for him by his former captors, the authorities, and all the other friends he meets along the way (and in his memories)."
• El Camino explains the past, present and future of television: "The logistics of viewing El Camino alone serve as a telling indication of how TV has changed, and of Breaking Bad’s role in accelerating that evolution," says Alison Herman. "Breaking Bad, of course, first aired on AMC, a small network known for airing classic movies that had just begun branching into original series. El Camino, too, will eventually be shown on AMC, though not until a date in 'early 2020' that has yet to be determined. First, however, it can be found where many viewers originally discovered Breaking Bad in the first place: streaming on Netflix... Ironically, AMC’s soon-to-be competitor was also a key contributor to its success. Before Netflix began to invest billions in its own trove of originals, it licensed various back catalogs, often leading to a symbiotic, scratch-my-back-and-I’ll-scratch-yours arrangement for which Breaking Bad became the poster child."
• There's an initial awkwardness to seeing Paul, now a stockier 40-year-old man, putting a beanie back on and playing a character referred to as a teenager
• If El Camino deserves any criticism, it has to be for its pace: The film moved too quickly for 122 minutes
• Vince Gilligan, Aaron Paul and Bryan Cranston talk everything Breaking Bad
• Gilligan revealed the ending of El Camino years ago
• Composer Dave Porter on returning to the Breaking Bad universe: "I’ve had to keep secrets for a relatively much shorter period of time than everyone else"
• Twitter users "body shame" Jesse Plemons over his El Camino appearance
• Aaron Paul discusses El Camino and its many surprise cameos
• Paul says El Camino originally had a different ending