Netflix ‘El Camino’ does not justify its existence, but “Breaking Bad” fans should take a look
I thought it was a very early or very late April Fool’s joke when Netflix announced that they would debut a new Breaking Bad movie directed by Vince Gilligan with Aaron Paul this fall to put a bookend on a series that ended six years ago.
El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie is essentially a sequel to the series in double size, focused on the immediate consequences of the series finale, a series finale that most fans were happy with at the time when it certainly did not seem necessary anymore attached.
As such, El Camino is a strange project that seems to cast a spell over Vince Gilligan and Aaron Paul, and a commercial one for Netflix, as they can assign their name to one of the biggest shows in history (AMC, Breaking Bad’s original home tells me that they will play the movie later.
The result is an interesting watch, part of the action movie, part of the nostalgia tour, but to talk more about it, we need to be in the field of spoilsport.
The movie begins right after the series finale, literally seconds after Jesse escapes from the Nazi grounds, and has to start dodging the police. We learn that both Walt’s meth-empire and the ensuing gunfight have hit the news to a great extent, and though there are reports of Jesse’s imprisonment by the Nazis, he still appears to be a victim, no good will come from capturing him Jesse has to find a way to disappear.
It’s a strange project because so many of the series’ heroes and villains are dead or gone by then. To solve this, El Camino offers frequent glimpses of various invisible moments in the Breaking Bad years, including a return to Jesse, a neon-sized hoodie that was once again fun. In the past we have flashbacks with Mike, Todd and Jane. At the present time, Jesse reunites with Skinny Pete and Badger, but the gist of the story is that he gets enough money to give the mysterious “New Identity Creator” a completely new life, just like Saul does.
Walter White? Yes, he is here too. Toward the end of a review, Jesse from the hoodie era talks to Walt in a diner with the Meth-Lab campervan parked outside. Walt tries in vain to talk to Jesse about his future, though it’s important what Jesse is going through in the present. But bad news for conspiracy theorists, as if there’s one thing the film makes explicit to confirm that Walter White was found dead at the site of the gang massacre, if the original end did not make that clear.
An interesting thing about El Camino was the problem of the lack of a villain, considering that they are all dead, which solves the film in two ways. First, there are longer flashbacks to Jesse’s time in captivity, and in those sequences we get longer interactions with our good friend Todd, who are really some of the best parts of the movie.
In this day and age, they had to create a completely new villain in the form of a former ally of the Nazi group, who helped Jesse build his meth-cooker that would fix him to the ceiling. This guy and his partner know that Todd has put money aside, and Jesse has several run-ins, including one last confrontation, which is certainly one of the best scenes in the movie. The only problem I had with it was that Scott MacArthur was the main villain I saw as a villain in HBO’s “Righteous Gemstones,” which I thought about every time he was on screen.
In the end I do not know that this movie had to exist. It ends the same way it started. We all assumed that Jesse would be free after Walt helped him escape, and we could imagine what his happy ending would look like. Here he gets the end and it is clear this time.
I do not think El Camino is damaging the legacy of Breaking Bad in any way, and I think most fans will like it because A) it’s nice to see the old actors again, and B) it’s Vince Gilligan, and the Guy can not produce anything bad these days. It’s just a strange project.
And of course Breaking Bad is not over yet technically. Gilligan continues to make new episodes of Better Call Saul, the storylines that focus primarily on Saul’s life before the events of the show, with a few glimpses of what comes next when he tries to come up with a new identity all over kick off. Interestingly, of all the cameos we see in El Camino, neither in the flashbacks nor in today’s events is Saul one of them.
So yes, if you’re a fan of the show, you can also check out El Camino. I do not think Breaking Bad really needed an epilogue, and it feels strange to return to the show all the time later, especially since I have not done a new watch yet, but I enjoyed it, and Gilligan and Paul are both with the Tip of her game here.