El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie

El Camino (2019) starts where the last episode of Breaking Bad ended and answers a single question: what happened to Jesse Pinkman after he drove away. The finale left him driving off. The film opens with the first hours of that drive. Jesse has no money, no identity and nowhere to go, and the police are looking for him. What the film does is not generate action but show what a person looks like after captivity. Jesse was kept chained for months and the film returns to that in flashback. The quietest scenes are the hardest ones. Vince Gilligan wrote and directed it and kept the shoot secret. Production ran under a false title, cast and crew were tightly restricted to prevent leaks, and the film's existence was only announced after shooting had finished. Some faces from the series return and those visits are kept short; it never stops being Jesse's film. Aaron Paul barely speaks. For six years the character's mode was shouting; here he plays him as someone who has lost his voice. It went out on Netflix and played in cinemas the same day. It runs 123 minutes. Good for: viewers of Breaking Bad, crime drama, and character pieces. Less good for: it means nothing without the series. There is violence and captivity, and the pace is slower than even the final season.