Were there a tragic resonance to be found in the relatively young Pinkman’s pathway to a snowy oblivion, it’s obscured by the kind of low-grade humour that relishes bros calling each other ‘bitch’ and seems to find comedy in the very idea of the murder of someone’s cleaning lady. If this fantastically empty endeavour is characterised by anything, it’s a kind of glib machismo, that the original show could be guilty of displaying, but is concentrated down here. You won’t find many women speaking actual lines among the assembled cast: there is no reappearance from Skyler or her sister Marie, it’s sad to say, though hey, we do a get a gaggle of nondescript, fur-coated sex workers. The latter scenes are fan service as its most lumpen, narratively and dramatically negligible as they are, though it’s difficult to see how even the most ardent fans could get excited by them. Inevitably, there are a series of cameos from familiar faces – a few, like Pinkman’s wastrel buddies Badger and Skinny Pete, appearing in the present timeline, while others – including, yes, that one – are crowbarred in via flashback. The best things are the expensive-looking wide shots of the New Mexico desert, which show the producers striving to give it some cinematic currency, even if only a small number of people will, like this reviewer, ever see it in a cinema. Then, when bits of incident do occur, they are purely ludicrous. At points, it is so boring that it’s almost avant-garde. Pinkman edges around the nondescript Albuquerque suburbs, trying to set himself up to get out of town, in a series of listless scenes whose dialogue is all padding. What we get is a fugitive thriller without the thrills, and a character study without any character. It picks up where we left off, with Pinkman driving through the fences of the Nazi compound White had rescued him from, and follows him over the course of a few days, as he attempts to evade the cops and escape New Mexico unseen for a new life in Alaska. Instead, Gilligan has opted for the more obvious focal point of Pinkman, and a story of very limited span. When we last saw Skyler, she was living in an airless flat with her two children, working as a taxi dispatcher, her life of suburban affluence decimated: a film checking in with her now could have been a worthwhile endeavour. An interesting and dramatically fertile choice would have been to focus on White’s wife Skyler: as she discovered her husband’s criminal activity, then reluctantly decided to collude with him, her morally compromised journey became one of the show’s most interesting aspects, even if some keyboard warriors notoriously directed abuse at her - and Anna Gunn, the actress who played her - for supposedly being a nag. The question was always: where exactly could a sequel go? That closing shot of White bleeding out on the floor suggested he was very much a goner. Just how inessential the result is, though, is frankly mind-boggling. So when a two-hour film called El Camino was finally announced over the summer, it felt inevitable if, by this stage, not altogether essential. We have had the prequel series Better Call Saul, but despite acclaim, it has been too esoteric to achieve the same cut-through. Ever since the series five finale, when White took himself and his Nazi enemies down in a hail of machine gun fire, the possibility of a movie sequel has been the subject of excited speculation. But that’s not to say that the Breaking Bad fandom has dissipated. Six years on from its end, and the TV zeitgeist has decisively moved on – to Killing Eve and Fleabag, Russian Doll and Succession to anti-heroines, less ambiguously awful men, and more sophisticated comedy-drama hybrids. Already, too, it feels of its era, as one of the pillars of the so-called ‘anti-hero’ age, when morally dubious men did very bad things in confusingly alluring style. Casually returning to some old episodes on Netflix, it’s difficult to remember quite why, collectively, we were so over-awed by the curdled buddy antics of rogue chemistry teacher Walter White (Bryan Cranston) and his former pupil-cum-fellow crystal meth dealer Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) – entertaining, then progressively more harrowing as they were. Did we need more Breaking Bad? Given some distance on it, the sheer level of fervour Vince Gilligan’s dusty drugs drama once inspired has now come to seem like something of a fever dream.
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