Having now successfully gifted “Prestige
Cable Television” with its own answer to
The Silmarillion via Better Call Saul, Vince
Gilligan now turns to Netflix and the streaming
world to deliver a “Nightwing” for the
Breaking Bad Universe in El Camino; picking
back in the immediate aftermath of Jesse Pinkman’s
escape from the remote-operated villain-on-villain
slaughter of his captors by fallen mentor
Walter White in the not as important to the
plot as you might think car of the title and
follows him on his quest to… well, that’s
sort of the movie - we don’t really know.
You see, the challenge of the whole following-up or spinning-off Breaking Bad after the fact thing is that
most of the show was about how Walter White functioned like a malevolent black hole of a human
being, with a gravitational pull that drew everything
around him inward and ultimately destroyed
it unless it pulled away until he, finally,
ceased to be… and even now, there’s a
terrible radiation left in his wake that the
survivors are mostly trying to crawl out of it
if they’re unfortunate enough to be aware
of what caused it in the first place.
And part of what that means is that even richly
performed, well-drawn supporting players like
Aaron Paul’s Jesse were not (by
design) fully understood beyond what
context of who and what they were in relation
to a former main character who no longer exists:
Even though dedicated fans are already comfortable
with their presence, mannerisms, catchphrases, etc…
any movie is still going to need to invent
(and get us invested) in the 80-90% of the
their inner lives and daily routine that didn't directly involve Water White or the main storyline of
Breaking Bad. So add the fact that Jesse’s “I just gotta
get out of here” predicament being the most
viscerally compelling thing to the list of obvious
reasons why he got the movie.
And get it straight: This is “The Jesse
Movie.”
Yes, if you were guessing that the basic plot
outline goes something like “the cops are
investigating Walter’s operation, Jesse needs to settle his last debts get the hell far away as he can
while he still can, this involves zipping around
town meeting up with characters who are still
alive to introduce flashbacks involving characters
who are not still alive. I mean hey
...congratulations, you’ve seen “a movie”
before.
But, apart from that it shows admirable restraint in keeping the “Oh, hey!
It’s him!” business restricted to stuff
that mostly makes sense and only one of the
extended “Previously, during Breaking Bad
but during a part you didn’t see before” flashbacks
parts could be termed “moderately gratuitous and…
it’s kinda the one you want so… yeah.
Otherwise, this is as advertised, almost it’s
own thing - a lean, unpretentious, propulsive
and violent but not necessarily action-centric
“outlaw on the run” story that walks you
at a deliberate pace through a genre-shift
from “bottle episode of Breaking Bad”
to “American Southwest neo-noir” and finally
to something like a grimy modern day Western…
...all framed around the gradual self-contruction
of Jesse himself from the beaten-dog of the
series finale to affecting an older, more
traumatized but possibly still unformed version
of his more familiar persona from the series and finally what feels almost like the emergence of new, fully
grown man whose strikingly confident presence
makes what could well have been El Camino's
one step too far climactic shift into full-blown
Cowboy genre movie territory in Act 3 really
work in spite of itself.
I mean granted, part of the metanarrative for some
Breaking Bad had long been how clearly Aaron Paul
resembled a natural-born scrappy, leading-man
tough guy action movie type and how effectively
he subsumed that into the person of both
“young punk Jesse” and “strung out guy
having his life-force drained by association
with a guy like Walter” Jesse as the the series went
on. I mean it really was quite a performance considering how different he is from Jesse Pinkmen. So, it really
compelling to see his post-series
“spin-off arc” payoff turn out to be both:
“Jesse -
[long  beep]
but, also “Aaron Paul: Now available for work
- Because sometimes…
Chris Pratt is going to says “No.”
Million dollar question, of course, can you
follow it if you haven’t seen all of Breaking
Bad?
I mean… probably?
But I don’t know why you'd try.
I will say, I don’t feel like I missed out
by not fully re-bingeing it recently?
Like I felt pretty caught up, and it’s not
a fanservice heavy project like the Downton
Abbey movie was.
As present-day Southwest-set noir-ish dark
psuedo-Westerns go; it’s not as good as
Hell or High Water or Destroyer but it’s
extremely solid and I like it - 7 out of 10 give it a look.
