Metacritic reviews

That this film can stand on its own, all while paying tribute to the show that helped birth it, is maybe the most impressive escape act of them all.

El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie is a tense, well-written story with a brilliant performance from Aaron Paul.

What’s lacking in this entertaining pulp quest, I think, is some essential surprise.

Considering he’s spent nine whole seasons within his quirky New Mexico universe, there was never any doubt that Gilligan loves his characters, but goddamn does El Camino bring that idea home.

While it has both style and content, El Camino feels more like a feature-length TV episode than an actual movie. It is too compact and fragmented to truly stand on its own, and viewers who have not seen the preceding 62 hours of Breaking Bad will likely struggle to enjoy it.

When you have Vince Gilligan operating near the peak of his powers, and taking the time to fix one of the few things the show didn’t get quite right, it makes for one hell of an entertaining gift.

It’s a true movie, with the taut pacing, satisfying conclusion and grand visual scale that distinction implies.

El Camino is a high-quality piece of suspense and action filmmaking carried by Paul's still-tremendous performance as Jesse Pinkman. It looks great, sounds great and if you're a fan, it's full of cameos and references that are sure to amuse.

It’s fine, if not a little too long at two hours — but for “Breaking Bad” fans jonesing for something, anything, connected to the chronological timeframe of their beloved series, it should do the trick.

There’s a momentum to his story — it has a heist-movie-style checklist, carried out by a team composed of only one — that has its own satisfactions, and set-pieces with real tension, even if they lead to a less-than-novel place.