Review of El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (2019) by Sleestak — 14 Oct 2019

First of all, there was no reason to make this movie...Breaking Bad was an amazing show with an amazing finale and anything added to it, in my opinion makes the series worse. And it all came about because people (who need to be negative) were all like, "It was a good finale...but....but....What happens to Jesse?" These people need to understand that unless every character dies, we don't know what happens to ANY of them when they decide to end the story. The same is true of all stories...movies, TV shows, books, plays....and actually WONDERING what happens to characters next is just part of your involvement in the story and we all don't need to be spoonfed some gift wrapped ending for every character in every story.

Secondly, the story itself was pretty weak and slow and unbelievable. The main meat and potatoes of the plot is "Jesse tries to find a million dollars, finds it, then gets tied up by other people looking for the money (who...as far as I can tell, should have had no reason to believe that money was even hidden there)...then, inexplicably, untie him....and let him take about 1/3 of the money and leave. Yes....crooks who just found a million dollars decide to let someone else take 1/3 of what they just found rather than clubbing him on the head. I'm not a thief but if I found a million dollars in real life and you tried to take 1/3 of it and casually walk away, I would probably kill you and bury you in a shallow grave...but not these guys. Anyway....we find out that 1/3 of the money is not enough and so Jesse goes back and finds the other guys and we have a wild west gunslinger battle...like literally. What?!?!??! What about Jesse's character in the series ever made us think that "Oh yeah...he has balls of steel and also he has mad pistol skillz"? That is really all I want to address in the plot itself as what I just described accounts for 90% of anything that happened in the movie. I know...it sounds like that entire plot could have been filmed in 15 minutes...and it could have.

Thirdly....and I know this is just the nature of the beast when you wait a long time to film stuff but almost zero time has passed in show-time (See: Walt from Lost)but some of the characters aged VERY noticeably. While Jesse looks pretty much the same....Skinny Pete looks 60 and the biggest transformation is in flashbacks of Todd, where Todd looks 15 years older and 75 pounds heavier. And while you cant do TOO much with the additional age or weight, he didn't even act like the same person....it was very distracting.

The only redeeming quality of this movie (and the reason I even gave it a rating of 1 instead of 0) was the cinematography. The scenery and the effects and lighting were all very reminiscent of the original series and were done beautifully.

I just realy hope there is not going to be a Skyler "movie" for the people who are wondering "But what happened to Skyler"? Or one for Junior....or one for Gomey....or one for Marie......or one for any of the other characters whose story just ended....the way stories do.