El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie
El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (or simply El Camino) is a 2019 American neo-Western crime thriller film. Part of the Breaking Bad franchise, it serves as a sequel and epilogue to the television series Breaking Bad. It continues the story of Jesse Pinkman, who partnered with former teacher Walter White throughout the series to build a crystal meth empire based in Albuquerque. Series creator Vince Gilligan wrote, directed, and produced El Camino; Aaron Paul reprised his role as Jesse Pinkman. Several Breaking Bad actors also reprised their roles, including Jesse Plemons, Krysten Ritter, Charles Baker, Matt Jones, Robert Forster, Jonathan Banks, and Bryan Cranston. Forster died on the film's release, making it one of his final on-screen appearances.
El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie
Vince Gilligan
Breaking Bad
by Vince Gilligan
- Mark Johnson
- Melissa Bernstein
- Charles Newirth
- Vince Gilligan
- Aaron Paul
- Diane Mercer
Marshall Adams
- October 11, 2019
122 minutes[1]
United States
English
>$6 million[2]
>$40,000[3]
Gilligan began considering the story of El Camino while writing Breaking Bad's series finale. He approached Paul with the idea for the film in 2017, near the tenth anniversary of the show's premiere, and completed the script several months later. Principal photography began in secret in New Mexico in November 2018, lasting nearly 50 days. The project remained unconfirmed until Netflix released a trailer on August 24, 2019.
El Camino received a digital release on Netflix and a limited theatrical run on October 11, 2019, with an AMC television premiere on February 16, 2020. It drew positive reviews from critics and garnered several award nominations, winning Best Movie Made for Television at the Critics' Choice Television Awards and Best Motion Picture Made for Television at the Satellite Awards. El Camino additionally gained four nominations at the Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards for Outstanding Television Movie and other technical categories.
Plot[edit]
In a flashback to shortly before they leave Walter White's meth business,[N 1] Jesse Pinkman asks Mike Ehrmantraut where he would go to start over. Mike says if he were younger, he would go to Alaska, which Jesse finds appealing. Jesse expresses the desire to make amends for past wrongdoing, but Mike cautions that starting over would make that impossible.
In the present, Jesse flees the Brotherhood compound in Todd Alquist's El Camino.[N 2] He goes to the Albuquerque home of Skinny Pete and Badger, who hide the car and give Jesse a place to sleep. The next morning, Jesse calls Old Joe to dispose of the El Camino, but Joe leaves after discovering its LoJack. Pete devises a plan to make it appear Jesse fled after trading the El Camino for Pete's Ford Thunderbird. Pete and Badger give Jesse the money Walter gave them,[N 2] and Badger drives south in the Thunderbird so it appears Jesse is headed to Mexico. Pete stays with the El Camino and waits for the police to respond to the LoJack. Jesse departs in Badger's Pontiac Fiero. He learns from the radio news of Walter's fatal poisoning of a woman,[N 3] and of Walter's death.[N 2]
In a flashback to Jesse's captivity,[N 4] Todd takes Jesse to Todd's apartment to help dispose of his cleaning lady, whom he killed after she discovered his hidden money. They sidestep Lou Schanzer, Todd's busybody neighbor, and bury the corpse in the Painted Desert. Jesse briefly holds the pistol Todd left unsecured, but Todd talks him into returning it.
In the present, Jesse sneaks into Todd's apartment and searches for Todd's money. He finds the new hiding place, but policemen Neil Kandy and Casey enter and begin searching. Jesse hides but holds Casey at gunpoint after Casey finds him. Neil disarms Jesse, who realizes they are not police but thugs also looking for Todd's money. To save himself, Jesse reveals he found the cash. Lou reports finding an old note from Todd, and Casey distracts him by feigning interest. Neil and Jesse bargain over the cash and Neil lets Jesse take a third. As they depart, Jesse recognizes Neil as the welder who built the tether that held him while he was forced to cook meth for the Brotherhood.
Jesse finds Ed Galbraith, the "disappearer", who wants US$125,000 to aid Jesse, plus $125,000 for the previous occasion when Jesse hired him but failed to commit.[N 5] Jesse is $1,800 short and Ed refuses to help. Knowing they are being surveilled, Jesse calls his parents and feigns willingness to surrender. After his parents and the police depart, Jesse sneaks into the Pinkman home and takes two pistols from his father's safe, a Colt Woodsman and an Iver Johnson Hammerless.[9][10]
Jesse drives to Neil's shop, where Neil, Casey, and three friends celebrate with escorts and cocaine. After the escorts leave, he asks for $1,800, and Neil refuses. Seeing the Woodsman in Jesse's waistband, Neil challenges Jesse to a duel for his share of the cash. Jesse agrees, and when Neil reaches for his gun, Jesse shoots him with the Hammerless, which was concealed in his jacket pocket. Casey fires at Jesse, but Jesse kills him with Neil's gun. Jesse collects the driver's licenses of the remaining men and lets them leave after threatening to return and kill them if they tell the police. He recovers Neil's cash and departs after setting an explosion to cover his tracks.
In a flashback,[N 6] Walter and Jesse have breakfast after a multi-day meth cook. Estimating they will make more than $1 million, Walter laments having waited his entire life to do something special and calls Jesse lucky since he will not have to wait.
In the present, Ed drops Jesse off at a car parked near Haines, Alaska. Jesse gives Ed a letter for Brock Cantillo and acknowledges he does not want to say goodbye to anyone else. Driving off, Jesse has a flashback to his time with Jane Margolis.[N 7] He tells her he admires what she said about going wherever the universe takes her, but she dismisses it as metaphorical and encourages him to make his own decisions. Jesse drives on, smiling at the prospect of a new life.
Themes and style[edit]
While El Camino's plot focuses on Jesse Pinkman escaping to Alaska, writer and director Vince Gilligan stated that thematically, the film centers on Jesse's transformation from a boy to a man. As Jesse spent the entirety of Breaking Bad as Walter White's partner, El Camino in contrast shows Jesse coming to terms with his past and making his own decisions, free of White's influence.[12] This theme is prevalent in the flashbacks that bookend El Camino, with Mike Ehrmantraut at the beginning, and Walter White and Jane Margolis at the end. Alan Sepinwall of Rolling Stone detailed that while these scenes serve as a reminder of who Jesse used to be and all that he lost, "all three flashbacks are also about the way that Jesse has been forced by tragic circumstance to grow up and think more about his place in the universe and the impact he has on others. And they're about setting him on the road where Ed [Galbraith] leaves him at the film's conclusion".[7] Aaron Paul described his character Jesse as someone who went through "hell and back multiple times" and is still "paying for those sins", but Donna Bowman of The A.V. Club remarked that in freeing his ambitions from Walter White's manipulations, Jesse found his own redemption and avoided his mentor's fate, finally giving himself a chance for a future.[13][14]
The opening flashback with Jesse and Mike also sets the theme of Jesse wanting to start over while also making things right with his past. Though Mike warned that starting over would make it impossible to make amends, Sepinwall noted that Jesse was able to repay several emotional debts from the series with rectifying gestures throughout the film: giving a proper goodbye to his friends Badger and Skinny Pete, apologizing to his parents one last time, getting revenge against Neil Kandy and Casey, paying back his literal debt to Ed Galbraith, and sending his farewell letter of apology to Brock Cantillo.[7] Placing his own analysis on Jesse's final duel with Neil, Gilligan interpreted the scene as more than just Jesse getting the cash he needed for his escape, but also as a way of "exorcising demons" that plagued him from the events of the series. Both Gilligan and Paul speculated that Jesse would still be haunted by these demons, even in his new life in Alaska, but had at least achieved some form of vengeance for his past by ridding the world of an evil person.[12][13]
Breaking Bad was often categorized as a contemporary Western; this theme is also present in El Camino.[15][16] Gilligan expressed his admiration for director Sergio Leone and his love for the Western genre – he originally wanted to film Breaking Bad in the CinemaScope format Leone used for the Dollars Trilogy and got his wish in El Camino.[2][17] Critics noted the duel between Jesse and Neil as being directly in the style of Western films.[18][19] Gilligan referenced The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and other classic gunfights to sequence the scene with comparable camera coverage techniques, likewise composer Dave Porter used Western elements in the scene's score.[20][21] Ben Travers of IndieWire traced the film's Western influences to its "sweeping landscapes, lone survivor, and final stand-off", while Matt Zoller Seitz of Vulture called El Camino's title "unabashedly Western-tinged" and cited the final shot's lack of overt sentimentality as being true to the spirit of classic Westerns.[22][23]
Production[edit]
Conception[edit]
Vince Gilligan, the creator and showrunner of Breaking Bad, had the idea for El Camino while writing the series finale "Felina". He asked himself what happened to Jesse Pinkman after the events of the episode when Jesse escaped from the neo-Nazis' compound after being rescued by Walter White.[17] Though he kept Jesse's fate ambiguous in the finale's script, Gilligan offered two possibilities during interviews: a more realistic one where the police caught Jesse a few miles from the compound, and a second, more optimistic one where he got away but still had to cope with the terrible things he witnessed throughout the series.[24][25]
In the intervening years, Gilligan toyed with both approaches. One early idea involved Jesse hiding close to the Canadian border, getting lured back into crime to help a young woman in the town. This version ended with Jesse in a jail cell in the concluding scene, imprisoned yet at peace for the first time. Gilligan's girlfriend Holly Rice advised against this ending, saying fans would not appreciate seeing Jesse incarcerated after all he had been through.[26][27] He received the same feedback when separately pitching ideas for the film with the writing staff of Better Call Saul, a Breaking Bad spin-off also created by Gilligan that still aired at the time. The staff featured many writers from the original series; Gilligan originally served as co-showrunner during the early seasons before leaving the writers room to focus on other projects.[17][28] They also objected to this ending because they planned on using a similar idea for the series finale of Better Call Saul, which was still to come many years later, and felt this conclusion fit their story better than Jesse's.[29] After the negative reception to the concept of Jesse getting caught by authorities, Gilligan subsequently went with the storyline of Jesse escaping to Alaska.[26]
Reception[edit]
Critical response[edit]
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie has a score of 92% based on the opinions of 133 critics, with an average rating of 7.3/10. Its critical consensus read, "Entertaining if not essential, El Camino adds a satisfying belated coda to the Breaking Bad story – led by a career-best performance from Aaron Paul".[154] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned El Camino a score of 72 out of 100 based on 34 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[155]
Judy Berman of Time lauded Aaron Paul's "mesmerizing" lead performance, citing his ease at "fully re-inhabiting a role he hadn't played for years ... endowing Jesse with the same mix of (waning) goofiness and (escalating) existential terror that propelled him through the finale".[156] Liz Shannon Miller elaborated, in her review from The Verge, that "[Paul's] work in El Camino is staggering, given the high difficulty factor that comes with having to play so many variations of this character" and followed this by stating "what makes El Camino so compelling is the way it engages with how he's changed since those early days".[157] In contrast, GQ's David Levesley felt El Camino did not utilize Paul's full potential, saying that "without actors to bounce off, the film often doesn't know what to do with him".[158] Daniel Fienberg of The Hollywood Reporter would also highlight Jesse Plemons' performance, mentioning "Plemons never got the respect he deserved ... and this might be a good time to properly relish what an odd and awful guy Todd was".[159]
Fienberg further commended Vince Gilligan's direction, calling Gilligan "a precise and complicated visual stylist ... the conception of Breaking Bad as a modern Western has never been so clearly articulated and executed". He also credited cinematographer Marshall Adams, editor Skip Macdonald, and composer Dave Porter, all of whom worked on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, for helping El Camino "return to the original show's grammar".[159] Writing for Entertainment Weekly, critic Darren Franich called Gilligan's style "energetic" and lauded the larger budget being applied "more for high anxiety than flashy pyrotechnics", citing El Camino's cinematography, editing, and montages as examples.[160] Erik Adams of The A.V. Club found the Western imagery a bit "clumsily deployed" but complimented the scale of the film.[161]
Future[edit]
Both Vince Gilligan and Aaron Paul regarded El Camino as the proper conclusion to Jesse Pinkman's story, with neither having immediate plans for a sequel after the film's release.[71][199] Speculating on Jesse's new life in Haines, Alaska, following the events of El Camino, Gilligan surmised that Jesse "would enjoy the brewery and maybe get a job with the ski manufacturer ... the very nice people of Alaska would welcome him into the community".[71] Paul believed that Jesse is "going to keep his nose clean. He has quite a bit of cash on hand. And he's going to live a very modest lifestyle. He's moving to a very small place in Alaska, so he doesn't need all that much money. He knows how to work with his hands, and so he just needs to refresh those skills and become the artist that he was always meant to be".[13]
However, neither Gilligan nor Paul definitively ruled out the possibility of a sequel film to El Camino.[12][32] Gilligan wanted to create a new story outside of the Breaking Bad franchise once he helped finish the final season of Better Call Saul, but indicated a slight chance of returning to Jesse's storyline if everyone still held interest.[2][12] He suggested a possible sequel could take place in Haines.[71] Paul said he would be interested in playing Jesse again if Gilligan felt he had more story to tell, but highly doubted such a scenario could occur since the film gave the character a satisfying ending.[52] He also expressed a desire to work with Gilligan again, regardless if the project was related to Breaking Bad or not.[199] Though Paul signaled warmth to the idea of seeing Jesse's adventures in Alaska, he also declined the prospect of a new Breaking Bad season that would focus on him.[52][200]
Paul would eventually reprise Jesse Pinkman again in Better Call Saul's final season for two episodes, with Gilligan directing the second.[201] However, his character's appearances canonically took place before the events of El Camino.[202][203] After the initial announcement of his guest-starring role, Paul reiterated that any other return as Jesse Pinkman required Gilligan's involvement.[47] Gilligan reaffirmed he had no plans for any new entries in the Breaking Bad franchise shortly before Better Call Saul concluded.[201] Following the series finale, Paul said he felt confident that Better Call Saul marked Jesse's final appearances and called it a farewell to his character.[204]