El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (2019)

(Netflix Streaming, December 2020) Like many people, I binge-watched “Breaking Bad” as soon as the entire series made its way to Netflix in 2016ish. Picking up the pieces of the series’ plot in time for El Camino wasn’t as difficult as I would have guessed: while the film dutifully continues the events of the last episode as if no time at all had passed, it also revisits many of the series’ characters in such a way that you can easily remember who was who and what they did. The cameos are usually in increasing order of significance, so just wait and you’ll see your favourites at some point. Acting as more of a bonus coda than anything specifically new, El Camino focuses on Jesse as he escapes from the neo-Nazi compound, then spends the next few days putting his affairs in order and getting enough money to start a new life. Taking its cues from TV show structure, El Camino often feels like a series of short loop episodes, with Jessie dealing with a specific challenge before moving on to the next stage. Robert Forster makes an impression (in one of his last film roles) as an inflexible “cleaner,” and the film does get a pretty good sequence, as Jessie looks for hidden money in the lair of a dead nemesis. (Jesse Plemons is back in his irritatingly evil character, proving the banality of evil in many different ways.) El Camino is probably not work a look if you’re not already a viewer of the show: the story is decent, the production values are nice, but the film doesn’t really intend to stand alone nor offer meaning to anyone but those wanting another hit of “Breaking Bad.” Nothing wrong with that – just setting expectations straight.