![]() And yet the story it told moved on a gradient, depicting the growing monstrousness of meth maestro and Pinkman partner Walter White (Bryan Cranston) and Jesse’s increasingly frantic confusion at how to handle living in the reality Walt created. “Breaking Bad” was not a show whose great strength was its subtlety. Shown at far greater length in flashbacks interspersed throughout “El Camino,” Todd’s assaults come off as that most toxic of things: desensitizing. To wit: Jesse Plemons’ performance as Todd, the worst of Jesse’s tormentors, was of career-making interest on “Breaking Bad” for the degree to which it seemed random, an evil borne from nothing at all. Yet there’s an obviousness - one that haunts the long-tail legacy of “Breaking Bad” - in the title in flashbacks depicting various “Breaking Bad” characters, all dead in the movie’s timeline, urging Jesse forward in Jesse’s action-hero clarity of purpose and in the resounding gruesomeness of the abuse he is shown to have suffered at the hands of his masters. (Robert Forster, as a man who helps people disappear, is a welcome returnee from the world of “Breaking Bad,” but his assistance being the final step of Jesse’s quest feels surprising in its lack of surprise.) Vince Gilligan, the show’s creator and the film’s director and writer, makes use of a presumably robust budget and of the fact that “El Camino” will be exhibited on some big screens with some genuinely gorgeous shot making. There’s a momentum to his story - it has a heist-movie-style checklist, carried out by a team composed of only one - that has its own satisfactions, and set-pieces with real tension, even if they lead to a less-than-novel place. That journey is told with flair, if not always much wit or irony: Jesse has been through the darkest parts of “Breaking Bad,” and thus the show’s occasional levity has no place in his narrative now. ![]() Jesse needs to deal with loose ends and also to find a path toward redemption. “El Camino” is notionally named for the car he drives away from “Breaking Bad’s” final conflagration, but its title’s obvious double meaning - it translates to “the way”- generates the story’s real juice. This story follows Jesse as he works to break himself not only of any last associations to the underworld he’d too long dwelt in but of what inner hauntings remain. So it is: This Jesse is shorn both of friskiness and of anything outside his tunnel-vision understanding of what he needs to do to get free. A character’s throwback mention of one of Jesse’s giddy outbursts from the show’s run feels, with a resolutely un-giddy Jesse in frame, like a story not just from a different era but about a different person. After all, an older-seeming Jesse is the one that the events of “Breaking Bad” have produced. And it helps “El Camino,” a mixed-bag continuation that undermines “Breaking Bad” nearly as often as it provides succor for fans, make its most elegant and oblique points. ![]() This serves the character, one who has every reason to have aged more than six years during his time in captivity.
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