Breaking Bad Movie: An Entertaining Yet Unnecessary Ride

Jeff D Lowe10/11/2019 4:59 PM

After a long wait, the Breaking Bad movie, ‘El Camino’, is finally here.

This is a KenJac only review for now, with Jeff D Lowe adding his on Monday. Enjoy…

KenJac (80/100): As a fan of Breaking Bad, it’s hard not to be reactionary and rate this movie higher than it deserves. At the end of the day, however, it didn’t feel necessary. The comparison I was looking for in this movie was this: Will it be entertaining in its own right while offering closure to the series like ‘Deadwood’, or feel hollow like ‘Entourage’. I think the answer to my question is that it’s somewhere between those two points.

Aaron Paul returns as Jesse Pinkman and is the focal point of the movie. Plenty of old alums make appearances both within the timeline and flashbacks, but this is the Jesse Pinkman movie. Paul does a great job, as expected, especially considering the new dimension to Jesse Pinkman necessary for this movie. He’s not the same character he was for the first 95% of the series. He’s a broken, desperate human that’s spent the last nine-ish months as the captive of animals. Major props to Paul for nailing that desperation, and really hitting some suspenseful moments like the ones teased in the trailer. The only other cast member I want to mention is Scott MacArthur, only because he was perfectly evil in this and delightful in ‘The Righteous Gemstones’.

As far as the movie goes, it certainly offers some suspenseful moments and gives a more definitive closure to the series. My issue is this: Breaking Bad had one of the most objectively perfect endings a television show could have. I think if you polled 100 people off the street and asked them what show they think had a perfect ending, a decent chunk of them would actually pick Breaking Bad off the top of their head. So if you’re going to touch upon that ending, it had better either improve or at least match what you already did. I don’t feel like this movie does that, which is sort of a bummer. It’s beautifully shot and has some of the signature twists and turns we’ve come to expect from Vince Gilligan, but it still just didn’t feel necessary.

For a Breaking Bad fan, this is a must-watch. It doesn’t ruin the series by any stretch of the imagination, it definitely entertains at points. It simply feels like filler. Like a few extra episodes of the series to watch that are not ‘Felina’ or ‘Say My Name’, but also aren’t bad. Watch it for the scene alone.

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We will wait on scores from Jeff D Lowe, Trillballins and the Audience to find out if it is Officially Buttered. We will do an in-depth review of the movie on Lights Camera Barstool next week. Make sure to rate all 2019 and 2018 movies in the links below.

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