[8.4/10] When I think about Jesse Pinkman’s journey over five seasons of *Breaking Bad*, I think of how he changed in terms of his potential and his morality. He was the layabout accessory to Walter White’s destructive brilliance, until he came into his own, as a cook and as a part of something. He was the screw-up the Schraders considered “trash,” but he turned out to have the bigger heart, to feel so much the pain he had caused to this world.
So when *El Camino* was announced. I wondered where else there was for him to go. After Vince Gilligan and his colleagues made a spin-off prequel about a tertiary character into one of the best shows on television, it’s worth trusting that creative team wherever they want to take us. Still, *Breaking Bad* ended with closure -- more for Walt than for Jesse -- but with enough of a suggestion of what’s to come to warrant wondering what a Pinkman-focused epilogue would have left to show us.
The answer is a story of recovery and escape, as Jesse tries to evade the cops, scrounge what he needs to get by, and get the hell out of dodge. It is also an opportunity for Gilligan & co. to do what they do best -- back their characters into corners and then find tense, clever, and creative ways for them to work themselves out.
But most of all it’s a story about agency, and with that, about tying off the last dangling thread of transformation for Jesse Pinkman after *Breaking Bad*. The purpose of the story *El Camino* tells in the past is to show us the ways in which Jesse has, for a very long time, had his life directed by other forces. Whether it was Walt’s scheme or Gus’s operation, or just the general listlessness with which he drifted through his existence, he was object, not subject, in his own life.
But the story the movie tells in the present is about him being rid of all those encumbrances, and even the wreckage that his life had become, and making choices for himself. It’s a story about him being without Walt, without Mike, without Gus, without his parents, without Jane or Andrea or most of the meager support system that ordered him around or used him or generally set the course for this young man.
It is also, naturally, a story about being on the run from the police. Those fans who tuned into *Breaking Bad* less for the cerebral interrogation of what evils (and goodness) lies within the hearts of men, and more for the heart-pumping games of cops and robbers will not walk away disappointed. Not only does *El Camino* check in with almost every significant figure that Jesse crossed paths with, but it delivers the sort of life-and-death puzzles and grimy tension that the original series thrived on.
Gilligan (who both wrote and directed the movie) takes time to show Jesse recovering from the PTSD of having been locked in a cage by Neo Nazi fucks for months on end, suffering from the prospect of having to kill an innocent person again, and basking in the hard-won freedom that he can finally enjoy.
But he also shows Pinkman evading the police’s efforts to use the lojack attached to the titular car (thanks to an unexpectedly brilliant plan from a kindhearted Skinny Pete!), thinking his way out of a scrape with a pair of crooks masquerading as beat cops, and bargaining his way into a ticket out of town with Saul Goodman’s “disappearer” before he sics the authorities on him.
Each of these sequences, whether in the quieter moments or the more pulse-quickening ones, is done to visual perfection. *Breaking Bad* fans will appreciate the standard desolate-but-beautiful desert landscapes and time lapses. But Gilligan also includes some of his usual stellar montages, where a search for hidden cash becomes a way to communicate the tactile hardship of the task. Low lights and shadows and Jesse’s face reflected in mirrors represent the way the film and its protagonist are working out his identity. And quick cuts from saccharine love songs to a captive digging a grave capture the starkness and dark humor that always permeated the show.
He also includes the characters that always made the series so engrossing, even between the big bangs. Everyone from psychopath-next-door Todd Alquist to the doctrinaire but fair “vacuum repairman” Ed Galbraith, to a meddling, nothing-better-to-do neighbor make an impression. Those figures lead to weird laughs -- whether it’s Todd crooning along to the radio with a corpse in his truck, or the nosy neighbor offering his useless assistance -- and consistently add color to this world. Aaron Paul gives his usual amazing performance as Pinkman, and manages to hold the center opposite all of these fantastic scene partners, no matter what stage of Jesse’s life he’s inhabiting at the moment.
*El Camino* cuts back and forth to those different points often, doing a greatest hits of Jesse’s meaningful interactions with hallowed *Breaking Bad* figures past and present. But the film never devolves into fanservice. While it indulges a little explicitly in the series’s “it’s really a Western” roots, it uses those flashbacks to inform the present in meaningful ways, not just to play a game of “remember when.” Jesse’s interactions with Todd in the past might prove to be the key to getting him on his feet in the present, or suggest how and why Jesse knows where to go next.
But they also speak to the gigantic step Jesse is taking through all of this. *El Camino* opens on Mike Ehrmantraut all but demanding that Jesse start making choices for himself rather than bending to the whims of others. It closes with Jane telling him that “going where the universe” takes you as a crock, and that he needs to make his own decision. In his awkward, Walter White way, Jesse’s partner in crime writes off his encouragement as “just making conversation” but also subtly reveals his belief that Jesse can do something special, particularly with so much of his life left ahead of him.
The Jesse Pinkman we see as this epilogue closes is one taking those lessons to heart. He makes choices here: finding his own ways out of trouble, writing his own ticket to a new life, and when he has no other choice, taking out the people who saw his suffering and did nothing. The Jesse we leave the world of *Breaking Bad* with is one who acts, rather than is acted upon, who chooses, rather than has choices thrust upon him, and who, unlike the man he followed through so much of the series, seizes his opportunity to have a second chance and learn from all of this.
*El Camino* justifies itself by adding one last capstone to Jesse’s transformations over so many episodes -- from a young man dealing with the effects of so many others, to one finally driving after his own cause.
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