Breaking Bad series creator Vince Gilligan returns to helm a one-shot epilogue centered around Jesse Pinkman in El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie. Taking place right after the events of the acclaimed AMC drama, El Camino is neither essential nor groundbreaking, but it is an absolute pleasure to behold. Like slipping on a pair of worn and comfortable shoes, Gilligan and Aaron Paul make a thrilling and confident return to the world they left behind six years ago. Minor spoilers ahead…

“Felina,” the final episode of Breaking Bad, aired on September 29, 2013. At the time, the episode seemed to be a period punctuating the end of one of the greatest television shows of all time: Walter White (Bryan Cranston), making a final stand against the Neo-Nazis, gets his revenge and frees a beleaguered Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) from captivity, only to bleed out as the law closed in around him. While “Felina” is a fine entry in the pantheon of prestige TV series finales, it wrapped up a string of episodes in which Jesse took a backseat to Walter White’s swan song. Over six years later, El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie looks to give the series’ ostensible second lead some closure and a more involved send-off. Series creator Vince Gilligan’s welcome return as director results in a slight but memorable postmortem for the Breaking Bad story; this 122-minute potboiler might not be an essential component of the Walter White mythos, but it is an undeniable pleasure to revisit this world again. And while Jesse Pinkman was originally slated to die early on in the show’s original run, El Camino proves more than ever that the decision to keep him alive - and Aaron Paul employed - was a wise one.

Picking up exactly where the series finale of Breaking Bad left off, the film begins with Jesse peeling away from the Neo-Nazi compound in Todd Alquist’s (Jesse Plemons) El Camino, tears streaming down his face. Free from his sadistic captors but still wanted by the police as Heisenberg’s accomplice, Jesse has a simple goal: gather enough funds to buy his relocation to Canada from Ed Galbraith the vacuum-slinging “disappearer” (the late and great Robert Forster, in his final role). The narrative of El Camino isn’t one to turn many heads; instead, it focuses on what Vince Gilligan and Breaking Bad do best: conveying the rigmaroles of crime and writing characters into impossible situations. Splitting the difference relationship-driven charms of Better Call Saul and the crime drama of its parent series, Gilligan crafts El Camino as a crowd-pleasing western. There’s plenty of fan service tucked into every corner of the film - from the return of fan favorites like Badger (Matthew Lee Jones) and Skinny Pete (Charles Baker) to some other surprising cameos, there’s a lot of fun callbacks for hardcore fans to chew on, but it never lays it on too thick.