Paul’s performance was often overshadowed by Cranston’s during the series’s run, but he’s phenomenal here. For much of “El Camino” he practically stars in a silent film, giving us Jesse as a hunted animal so scarred that even speaking is an effort. (This makes an asset of the 40-year-old Paul’s playing a character in his twenties; you can believe that Jesse’s last year aged him a decade.) When, in a flashback scene , his captor Todd ( Jesse Plemons ) talks him out of a gun and a shot at freedom, a tear leaks out of Paul’s eye like the last liquefied remnant of Jesse’s spirit.

“Breaking Bad,” with its standoffs and lonely desert vistas, was always at least half Western. “El Camino” is even more so, literally climaxing in a “Wild West” quick-draw gunfight and fitting its heist scenes into an outlaw-gets-out-of-Dodge story. “El Camino” means “the road” or “the way” in Spanish, and the title is as much about Jesse’s path from A to B as it is about his temporary wheels.

Scene for scene, the movie is a satisfying reminder of what “Breaking Bad” did so well, not simply because it manages curtain calls for Jonathan Banks (as the grizzled enforcer Mike Ehrmantraut ), Robert Forster (as Ed, the vacuum-cleaner salesman with a sideline in disappearing criminals) and Krysten Ritter (as Jesse’s departed junkie soul mate, Jane — a rare female presence in what is a very male story even by “Breaking Bad” standards).

There’s that familiar, arid humor, much of it coming during that lost weekend at Todd’s apartment, when he and Jesse removed the body of Todd’s cleaning lady. (I had not pegged him as the space-age bachelor pad type.) There’s the trademark use of cars as character, as Jesse tries to make it to the finish line in a borrowed rattletrap Pontiac Fiero. Gilligan walks Jesse through a gantlet of frying pans and fires, a series of break-ins and double-crosses as tense and seamless as any “Breaking Bad” caper.

But that’s the thing: They’re almost exactly what you’d expect from a “Breaking Bad” episode, except more drawn-out. A series that popularized the idea of TV as “cinematic” — spectacular in visual scale, adept with surprising imagery and montage — has produced an actual film that plays like an extended TV episode.