Mario's Musings: El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie

Mario’s Note: Look, El Camino came out over the weekend and I’d be remiss not to review it. So here’s a break from Halloween themed flicks for one day.

“Look, I like making cherry product, but let’s keep it real, alright? We make poison for people who don’t care. We probably have the most unpicky customers in the world.”

One of my favorite lines from Jesse Pinkman regarding the business he and Walter White got themselves into. Breaking Bad and its spinoff Better Call Saul showed us the seedy underworld of the drug trade, the fried chicken business, and televised lawyers. El Camino is like an epilogue to that whole story, following Jesse Pinkman after the events of Breaking Bad. It wraps the gift of those two shows up in one pretty pink bow that we may or may not have needed. 

Jesse has certainly seen better days…

…but a shower and shave fixes all that.

Truth be told, it’s been a long time since I watched Breaking Bad and I need to finish the most recent season of Better Call Saul, but I’ll be honest, I liked it a lot. Maybe it was nostalgia and not seeing the Jesse Pinkman character in a couple of years? I pretty much haven’t watched Breaking Bad since the finale back in 2013. So there was a bit of a rush seeing Jesse Pinkman right where we left him after the series finale, interacting with some old friends in present time, and interacting with some older characters from the past in a couple of flashbacks that really just served to pad out the run time of the movie. 

Robert Forster also comes back in what would become one of his final film roles as Ed the Cleaner. I had kind of forgotten about his character (again, 2013), so it was kind of a kick to the stomach to see him one more time.

All in all, I liked it; it’s an extra long episode of Breaking Bad. Give it a watch on Netflix.