![]() Much of what makes this a success for both fans and agnostics is in how those pre-existing “Breaking Bad” characters join the fray. Jesse isn’t infallible - as always, Paul is more than capable of wordlessly communicating when Jesse knows he’s made a mistake - but seeing the meticulous way he tackles these very specific objectives shows just how much he learned from his former partner in crime. Just as one chance at escape presents itself, that solution raises a pair of new problems to solve. Much as the show continually wrote itself into a corner just to come up with a way to squirm out again, Gilligan writes “El Camino” as a series of logistical obstacles for Jesse to overcome. “El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie” Ben Rothstein / Netflix And as the opening scene of “El Camino” clearly posits, there are some things that even a second chance can’t correct. Jesse is clearly painted as someone with nothing to lose, but with a razor-thin chance at starting over. The look in a character’s eye as a gun is being aimed squarely at his head isn’t any more potent just because you’ve seen that look in previous seasons. The reemergence of some characters will certainly make more sense with some Albuquerque context, but the simplicity of Jesse’s drive for survival adds an urgency to “El Camino” that would be there with a nameless, faceless hero. The short, overly simplistic answer is “all of the above.” Even with nods to broader strokes and specific moments within “Breaking Bad” history, “El Camino” still exists as its own self-contained story. Is it for series obsessives, desperate for any last trickle of information about these characters? Is it for the decade-long skeptics who heard about season-long binges and decided they’d rather not bother until something came along that was more concise? Or is it for the Netflix subscriber who’s content with watching whatever the platform pushes through its homepage, fine with spending a few hours with the shaved head and weeklong stubble? That the film’s 125-minute runtime still feels brisk and propulsive, even with so many sequences of relative calm and introspection, is an impressive achievement that solidifies “El Camino” as an appropriate addition to the greater “Breaking Bad” saga. “El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie” Ben Rothstein All of those strands are in “El Camino.” It leans into the contemplative half of that equation, while ensuring that audiences learn as much about Jesse’s resolve as any Mexican standoff could show. Fiery set pieces surely made up part of the “Breaking Bad” DNA, but so did mournful moments of reflection and the banality of running an international criminal enterprise. Written and directed by “Breaking Bad” boss Vince Gilligan, “El Camino” in its construction feels more like a final extension of what made the show compelling, rather than something artificially crowded with canon-shifting revelations or the reinvention of a winning blueprint. ![]() Greta Gerwig to Direct Two ‘Narnia’ Movies for Netflix - Report Loosed from his prison cage and behind the wheel of a stolen car, Jesse spends most of the film trying to flee from the authorities chasing him down while the film itself flashes back to the memories he can’t outrun. Many of those elements can also be found in “ El Camino,” the new Netflix film - and feature-length series epilogue - that follows Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), starting mere seconds after audiences last saw him in the “Breaking Bad” finale. The tonal balance needed to present its main protagonist as both a desperate man and a monster, with a dexterity in writing that can deliver a three-word dagger and an episode-title puzzle with equal ease, and the delicate spatial choreography needed to pull off some signature pyrotechnics they all made the series an enduring achievement. Any montage of the series’ most memorable moments would have explosions and car crashes and shootouts and stacks of money scaled high enough to take a nap on.īut it’s just as accurate to think of the six-season AMC series as a tragic ballet. It’s easy to think of “ Breaking Bad” first as an action crime drama.
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