El Camino review – the past leaves scars in Breaking Bad sequel

Of all of the major television series made in the past decade that one might have thought would merit one spin-off, let alone two, Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad was not especially high on the list. A fantastically gripping and visceral tale of the rise and fall of one of the least likely crime lords ever to have appeared in fiction, schoolteacher-turned drug kingpin Walter White, aka “Heisenberg”, it moved seamlessly between black comedy, family drama and edge-of-seat suspense, to award-winning effect. Many would cite it as the finest thing that they have ever seen on television, thanks in no small part to Bryan Cranston’s performance as White, and, as it ended in bloody, poignant and thrilling fashion in 2013, to the strains of “Baby Blue” by Badfinger, there seemed no need for a continuation.

We do, however, live in an age when an attention-sated audience cannot get enough of a good thing, and so not only do we have the excellent prequel Better Call Saul, which focuses on how dodgy-but-decent Jimmy McGill can metamorphose into evil-but-entertaining lawyer Saul Goodman, but now Gilligan has returned with a straight sequel, a two-hour continuation of the saga which picks up literally at the moment that the last series ended. Walter White is still dead, succumbing to a bullet wound amidst the gleaming splendour of a drugs lab, but his protégé Jesse (Aaron Paul) has escaped from the gang of neo-Nazis who have held him hostage to manufacture drugs for them, or “cook”, and is on the run, pursued by police and criminals alike. Predictably, nothing goes according to plan.

There is a great deal of talk in our society of “fan service”, or of films and series being precision engineered to please a particular audience, artistic integrity be damned. El Camino represents this to the highest degree, both in terms of the excellence with which it is executed and also of the essential redundancy of its premise. While Paul, an increasingly convincing and affecting presence in the original series, makes for a protagonist that one instinctively takes the side of, the narrative swiftly turns into a mixture of flashbacks and set-piece cameos. This allows for the return of deceased characters (who it would be unfair to reveal, but one can guess the highlights without particular difficulty), and also gives fan favourites such as Badger, Skinny Pete and the late Robert Forster’s Ed Galbraith their particular moment in the spotlight. Some are missed, others outstay their welcome, but this particular victory lap is one that few would begrudge.

If Gilligan, who both wrote and directed El Camino, has a central point, it is that the past leaves scars on one that are, literally and metaphorically, too deep to expunge. The opening, featuring the return of curmudgeonly hitman Mike (Jonathan Banks) sets out the store with admirable economy. Jesse, in search of adventure, asks Mike where the older man would recommend that he head with his drug money, to which he receives the reply “If I were your age, starting fresh, Alaska. It’s the last frontier. Up there, you can be anything you want.” As Jesse excitedly replies that he’ll “make things right”, Mike looks at him with contempt, leavened by pity. “Sorry kid, that’s the one thing you can never do.”

One of the central joys of Breaking Bad was the way in which certain lines of dialogue, almost incomprehensible out of context, became loaded with inordinate significance. Thus if one encounters someone hissing “If you don’t know who I am, then maybe your best course would be… to tread lightly”, or announcing in declamatory fashion, “I am the one who knocks”, then the allusion becomes a symbol of a shared kinship and a mutual understanding. Yet the giddiness and amphetamine rush of the original series is replaced in El Camino with a sadder, statelier pace, and the eminently quotable dialogue takes a back seat. There is a surprising paucity of action until the final third, although Gilligan’s patented slow drip-drip of tension is present throughout, and Walter White’s Shakespearean grandeur has been replaced by Jesse’s scrappier, angrier presence. This befits the character and the story being told, but some admirers of the original might feel disappointed.

If they do, then they only have themselves to blame. Gilligan has assembled a typically excellent ensemble cast, with Jesse Plemons’ homely psychopath Todd a particular stand-out once more, and allowed them to take their characters in interesting, if inevitably predictable or pre-ordained, directions, and, as ever, the vast vistas of the cinematography, simultaneously dwarfing or enhancing the characters, have a 70mm scope that means that seeing this on the big screen would be a highly enjoyable experience.

Yet what viewers are likely to take from it is not the giddy adrenaline rush that they might be expecting, but a sad, elegiac coda, best epitomised by one character saying to Jesse “You’re really lucky, you know that? You didn’t have to wait your whole life to do something special.” If El Camino has a reason to exist, it is to explore the lie behind that idea, and to show that Mike’s gruff admonition has its own truth behind it. After all, as Thomas Wolfe’s novel noted, you can’t go home again. The best you can hope for, as Jesse Pinkman does, is to make your peace with that, and trust in the future anyway.