

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.
#El camino netflix series
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. The path of El Camino is not a literal one – and it’s completed without a single ‘bitch’.It’s easy to think of “ Breaking Bad” first as an action crime drama.

#El camino netflix tv
Some of them are technical – like the great magnet–inspired conceits of the TV series – but others are emotional, even moral.

He achieves this metamorphosis gradually, through unlocking the various challenges that are laid in his path. Here, he is allowed to move on and leave both the clowning criminal – and the haunted victim – of the series behind.Įl Camino shows Pinkman become an adult, someone dressed not in bright yellow hoodies but cable knit jumpers. It’s the project he continues to be best known for – a privilege but also a tether. But it’s also true that Paul has since struggled to find a role that allowed him to put Pinkman behind him. It won him three Emmys for a start and, like a meth kingpin who had successfully hidden his money in the desert, it likely set him up for life. Paul told the Guardian this week that Breaking Bad “changed my life”. However, where it excels is in giving the character of Jesse some closure. That El Camino is a Netflix production – set to be released on the streaming giant today with only a smattering of cinema screenings (and none in the UK) – might explain this construction. It is too compact and fragmented to truly stand on its own, and viewers who have not seen the preceding 62 hours of Breaking Bad will likely struggle to enjoy it. But while it has both style and content, El Camino feels more like a feature-length TV episode than an actual movie. His penchant for bravura cinematography is on display once again, with one time-lapse sequence featuring eight Jesses creeping around a house proving a standout moment. Gilligan – who reprises his own role as writer and director – has always been good at keeping his audience on their toes. The film follows an interesting structure, and one that contradicts the impression given by some of the pre-release marketing. Most of the cameos should come as a surprise, but it doesn’t feel like spoiling things too much to note that there is a standout turn from Jesse Plemons as Todd, a child-like sociopath who plays good captor to Jesse during his time in the cage. El Camino cuts continuously between the 48 hours that follow Jesse’s escape, and a number of flashbacks, some from his time in captivity and some from earlier than that. The answer is several, including big hitters, even though most of them are dead. There has been much speculation among Breaking Bad enthusiasts – of which there are many – over which characters from the original show would return here. Rather it’s about someone who is trapped – not just in New Mexico, but in his head, bound by the trauma he has just experienced and the memories that help him, finally, to work out where to go next. El Camino (Spanish for “road” or “way”) is not the story of a man skipping town. The title of this ‘Breaking Bad movie’, then, is something of a misdirection. Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) and Walter White (Bryan Cranston) in Breaking Bad.
