El Camino review: a disappointing, shallow mess - 5/10

Written by The Curmudgeon

WARNING: The following review requires a familiarity with Breaking Bad. If you haven’t seen it, go watch it – it’s good.

SPOILER WARNING: There may be a light SPOILER in this review. The paragraph containing said spoiler will be highlighted in red.

After the televisual monolith of Breaking Bad (2008-2013) came to a close, people seemed – generally – pretty satisfied. What more is there to add? Walter White (Bryan Cranston) passes in a blazing shot at redemption, Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) escapes his captors and drives into the proverbial sunset. So, when the Netflix movie El Camino (2019) – a continuation of Breaking Bad – was announced, you can’t blame someone for being more than a little cautious.

I was trepidatious with the idea of a Breaking Bad movie. At first, there was no indication of what the film would be, and television rarely translates to film successfully. But the trailers looked incredible, and I quickly found myself coerced into excitement. A closer look at a tortured, emotionally damaged Jesse? I’m sold.

I will never be fooled by trailers again.

Unfortunately, El Camino is…pretty bad.

The plot revolves around Jesse, now a fugitive, trying to escape New Mexico the same way his partner did previously – the mysterious vacuum retailer with a side gig smuggling folks into a new life, replete with a new identity, and a shot at starting again.

Aaron Paul, Matt Jones and Charles Baker in El Camino (2019)

Contrary to what was promised by the trailer, the film runs a bit short in delving into Jesse’s ruined emotional state. That kind of content is relegated to the first 20 minutes or so, maybe less. The rest of it is a bunch of flashbacks telling us things we already knew, propped on a fairly uninteresting story about Jesse trying to scrounge up the cash to pay for his escape.

It’s here where El Camino really begins to fall apart. There’s no point wasting time re-explaining that Todd (Jesse Plemons) is an emotionally unhinged psychopath. We already knew that. Anyone who watched Breaking Bad would know that. There’s no sense of revelation or depth. And anything new which is explained through flashback is mostly just there to justify a plot which feels as though it’s making itself up as it’s going along.

Jesse Plemons in El Camino (2019)

For example, El Camino – fully aware that all the compelling antagonists, or characters who had a hand in terrorising Jesse, are now dead – pulls a villain out of its ass, and tries lazily to convince us to care through flashback. Said villain was never seen in Breaking Bad, and his involvement in the plot comes entirely out of left field. It’s like when someone tries to tell you a story, but every time they reach a crucial point in the story, they bombard you with important backstory which they forgot to mention before. To describe El Camino as ‘messy’ would be an understatement.

More noticeably, however, the film’s wince-inducing fervour for flashbacks completely annihilates any feeling of pacing. Constantly interrupting itself, the excessive use remembrance comes across as the filmic equivalent of a bad stutter. The pacing is so bad, in fact, that El Camino barely feels like a movie. It’s more like an infomercial telling us what happened to the characters after the show ended, each flashback clumsily pushing one scene to the next. There’s no rhythm.

The movie commits a much larger offence, however. That is to say, El Camino is irrelevant. By the time the credits roll, Jesse drives away, bound for freedom – and the audience has learned nothing new about him or any of the other characters we’re invested in. But this is no different to what was assumed in the Breaking Bad finale. The very last thing we saw of Jesse was his escape, presumably for a better life. We don’t need a feature film repeatedly diluting itself with self-justifying flashbacks to tell us what we already knew.

The movie isn’t all bad. Vince Gilligan still has his penchant for visual storytelling. There’s a shot early on which makes for a good demonstration:

Jesse attempts to hide himself from danger, but the long shot and wide framing make him appear vulnerable and exposed. Jesse’s distance from the POV dwarfs him, reflecting his emotional fragility. It’s all good stuff, and it’s as close as this film can get to recapturing the nuance of its predecessor.

El Camino also boasts some pretty great performances, not the least of which is Aaron Paul as Jesse Pinkman himself. He was great in the show and he's great in this. Jesse is a character who he owns completely, and any inkling of emotional depth can be boiled down to Paul's stellar portrayal of the character. Likewise, it's gratifying to see Matt Jones and Charles Baker reprise their roles as Badger and Skinny Pete respectively. They've got great chemistry, and it's genuinely interesting to see how sensitively they respond to Jesse's return from captivity.

Unfortunately, thoughtful visuals aren’t enough to carry the film when its script is so lacklustre. For every little thing that's done right, something is done wrong. From an unnecessary, fan-service-y Walter White cameo at the end (and a very noticeable bald cap) to some awkward and obvious attempts at humour, the movie is difficult to forgive.

So, the bottom line is this: El Camino is a shallow mess, patched together with flashbacks which tell us nothing new and serve only to explain the film’s existence. Ultimately, the story adds nothing to Breaking Bad. It changes nothing, and no amount of visual flare is going to save this movie from redundancy.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to scrub this movie out of my brain with absinth.