Running from ghosts the only action in flat Breaking Bad spin-off

El Camino may be a wonderful send-off for hard-core fans of the series, but it ultimately fails.

Aaron Paul in a scene from El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie, showing on Netflix.

To its fans, Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad was a 62-hour parable about pride, power and the pathology of manhood, shot like cinema but rich as a novel. And so suspenseful as to grind the teeth — a show with meth-like properties, where every ending was a cliffhanger. Breaking Bad is of course the story of Bryan Cranston’s Walter White, a struggling high school chemistry teacher diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer at the beginning of the series who turns to a life of crime, producing and selling methamphetamine in a determined effort to secure his family’s ­future before he dies. White does this with the help of a former inattentive student from his classes, his loyal young partner, Jesse Pinkman, not so much acted by Aaron Paul as kind of inhabited.

White discovers that he is exhilarated by the existence he creates for himself; once rather doughy and ineffectual, he becomes intimidating and hard. When his wife, Skyler, played with such empathy by Anna Gunn in the series, once confronted him about being in over his head, he snapped. “Who do you think you see? I am the danger; I am the one who knocks,” he says, referring to doors being opened and people shot.

I watched it at the start, and caught episodes sometimes as they appeared, but have never had the time to sit and binge the entire series since it went to Netflix. (Bingeing is a luxury not often afforded to critics whose main job is to test and recommend, often not being able to get past the first few episodes as other commitments arise.) But like anyone in television I was sucked in by Gilligan’s startling approach to storytelling and the overriding moral that once you do the wrong thing, there’s rarely any turning back.

Walt, like all tragic heroes or heroines, embodies our own conflicting motivations and feelings. The ironies and complexities of life place all of us in situations where a single choice can be all-important.

As an old director, I loved the look of the show, so distinctive and effortlessly cinematic, a bracing level of realism overlaid with that so ­inventive stylisation. The show’s leading cinematographer, Michael Slovis, referred to it as a show on steroids, “stuff that doesn’t look like television”, where the visual language is inseparable from the show itself, with its anxious handheld camerawork, low, wide angles and tense spatial compositions, evocative visual angles and vibrant use of shadow and light. Gilligan’s only references for Slovis were Sergio Leone’s western The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly and William Friedkin’s kinetic The French Connection.

And you can see that filmic resonance in El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie that comes to us written and directed by Gilligan, a movie filmed in secret and, like the series, one that works at a higher level of technical expressiveness. But, while the movie looks as wonderful as each episode always did — those moments of eye-catching flair, the tightly framed perspectives that reflect the characters’ claustrophobic positions and those distinctive desert wide shots, the characters dwarfed by the natural world — it disappoints as a stand-alone experience.

It’s probably a wonderful send-off for hard-core fans, a tying up of loose ends for those who have watched and rewatched the five seasons, but lacking enough of the set pieces that so delighted fans it finally fails to convince. It also lacks that approach to violence that fires off the brain’s cells, somehow liberating the imagination. It’s an oddly drab, ruminative affair. The series was distinguished by pointed, vivid, sometimes oddly comic solos that could halt the story in its tracks and take on a life of their own, almost like performance pieces. They are largely missing here.

The film follows just what happens to Jesse Pinkman, starting mere seconds after audiences last saw him in the finale of the TV series. For the many viewers probably attracted by the immense promotion the film has received from Netflix but who have not watched it before, the streamer offers a well put together recap at the start, a refresher that contains a lot more excitement than the two hours that follow.

We see how Jesse understood at the end just how much Walter had betrayed him. And the way he was made a literal slave to meth-dealing white supremacists, something bulked out more viciously in the film. We see him wild-eyed like an animal, tortured, cooking for Nazi monsters, rarely seeing the light of day. And the way Walter ingeniously rescued him using that ­remote-controlled machine gun. We see Jesse speed off into the night in the classic red Chevrolet El Camino muscle vehicle, a hard top with a low truck bed, hysterical and screaming, laughing maniacally as he leaves his nemesis dead on the ground, shot in the stomach, as cops converge on his body. His future is so dark at this point he can’t penetrate its edges. Only laugh. And weep.

That’s the point where we pick up the movie, which turns out to be a kind of neo-western, a fugitive road movie (“el camino” translates as “the road” in Spanish) in which Jesse flees not only the authorities, suddenly the most wanted man in Albuquerque, New Mexico, but the consequences of years of wanton criminality: the heinous moments and memories he can never outrun.

Aaron Paul in a scene from El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie.

He wrestles with feelings of guilt about the deaths, most drug-related, of people with whom he’s been associated, largely traumatised and ­determined to never shoot anyone again, especi­ally cops. It’s a seemingly engrossing journey to start with, as though we are tracking the progress of a victim towards his own demise — maybe — one to which it now seems Jesse possibly consciously assents, solitude his final punishment.

The corrosive nihilism that affects all he does compels him to celebrate his own possible ­extinction as he rides to the ultimate end of the road. The performance is something to watch, Paul maintains a bone-deep weariness and isolation as his journey develops and a just-held-together dignity that, almost, gives the movie a moral centre. He’s extraordinary to watch, contrasting psychotic power with utter helplessness.

Gilligan’s movie starts brilliantly but he can’t keep it up and the character study of Jesse, the rhythms of his storytelling never really convincing; we never really get to understand his resolve to stay on that road. As he does there are many flashbacks and characters from the past that keep tormenting Jesse’s thoughts.

The first, though, is oddly contemplative as he speaks with an old crim from the past by a quiet river in the mountains, Mike (Jonathan Banks), a one-time fixer who urges Jesse to think of Alaska in which to disappear, the last frontier, a place where if he wants he can put things right, though it’s clear that’s something he can never do. Then, still screaming, back in the tormented present, he’s on the road again, ducking as the cops pass the Camino on the highway.

He’s helped by two stoner friends, Badger (Matt L. Jones) and Skinny Pete (Charles Baker), who once sold drugs for Jesse to recovering ­addicts at Narcotics Anonymous meetings. (Their crazy jive talk as they play a first-person driving video provides the only offbeat humour in the movie: “You couldn’t drive Thelma and Louise off the cliff.”)

They somehow get him on the road again — “Dude, you’re my hero and shit,” Skinny Pete tells him tearfully — as he chases cash for a new identity, constantly changing burner phones. Another flashback takes us to his time with sadistic tormentor Fat Todd, played again by Jesse Plemons in an oddly underplayed comic performance, and a glimpse of his time captive to the Nazi drug lords, imprisoned in that metal cage, only let out by Todd to help clean up the dead body of his housekeeper who discovered hidden cash in his apartment.

The memory leads him back in the present to the apartment searching for the hidden money but things go awry again when it’s clear he’s not the only one after the stash.

In the end, though, we are left with little more than a movie that follows a renegade hero trying to flee from the authorities chasing him down while the narrative flashes back to the memories he can’t outpace.

There is some redemption for suffering viewers with a gunfight straight out of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, right down to the extreme close-ups of the eyes of the shooter, Jesse suddenly the only calm and collected man in a moment of real tension. We wanted more set pieces like this and also what Gilligan calls “the in-between moments” that were such a feature of the series, the ­moments of metamorphosis that let us inside his characters’ heads and motivations.

One for the hardcore fans.

El Camino is streaming on Netflix.