El Camino: A Breaking Bad Story


2019 movie sequel to a television show

Rating: 15/20 (Jen: 17/20)

Plot: Jesse drives away from the chaos that ended the Breaking Bad series and attempts to take steps to start a new life.

As others have said, this is completely unnecessary, but I'm not going to complain about getting to spend a little more time with these characters, some in flashbacks and some in the story's timeline. Jesse Plemons is good enough to want to punch, it's always great seeing Larry Hankin, and Robert Forster gets one more chance to shine, but this is Aaron Paul's movie. And Paul is spectacular here, really much better than I remember him being in the original series although he did grow on me as an actor as the series progressed and his character matured a little.

Despite scrunched into a 2-hour running time, this maintains a similar deliberate pace and showcases Vince Gilligan's habit of putting cameras in strange places and is therefore not a departure at all from the style of the original series. Gilligan is a storyteller who knows how to create these impossibly tense moments and is so good at using visuals and sound to create memorable moments. It's a lot of unpredictable fun even if it doesn't exactly reveal new things about the characters of this world or add much to the series' resolution.

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