El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie
Year: 2019
Rating: R
Length: 122 minutes / 2.03 hours
While the television show Community always joked about getting “six seasons and a movie, Breaking Bad actually accomplished the feat with only five seasons of the best heart-pounding drama ever to be seen on the small screen. As an epilogue to this fantastic series, El Camino (2019) wraps up the one remaining loose end that remained from the series finale: what happened to Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul)? While El Camino is basically two episodes of Breaking Bad used to tie everything up into a nice little bow, it was nice to finally have that final bit of closure.
As is the case with a lot of Breaking Bad‘s best episodes, there are moments in El Camino that are hard to watch. Jesse’s slavery really hits home in this film as the viewer grapples with the intense psychological punishment that can break down a man and steal his motivation to find his freedom. While the film focuses on Jesse’s redemption, it does so in the masterfully crafted way that only Vince Gilligan can do. The art of each shot and scene is so reminiscent of everything else in the Breaking Bad universe that it almost made me want to go back and watch the whole series again.
Even though it was necessary to have flashbacks of Jesse’s imprisonment in this movie, it felt like these segments basically made up half of the film. Sure, the context was nice for the ultimate arc of redemption, but there were at least a few times where I had trouble figuring out if the scene was in the present or the past. Despite the satisfying ending, the end of this epic series felt a little repetitive to what we had already seen. Still, more Breaking Bad isn’t a bad thing.
The artful epilogue of the Breaking Bad saga, I give El Camino 4.0 stars out of 5.
