It wasn’t until a final howl of hope shot off the tortured face of Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) that you really understood how bad he had it in Breaking Bad. Through the gruff and scruff of the series’ back half, his agony was constantly, cruelly, and unfairly prolonged – to the point that the men who were hired to kill him converted the job into an acquisition of slave labor. This was one of the many ways Vince Gilligan’s pinnacle creation examined consequences, and its follow-up film, El Camino, is a comparatively simple story of a man trying to outrun them – well, at least the ones he hasn’t yet encountered.

Picking up right where the show left off six years ago, with Jesse speeding and squealing down the road after his liberation by chemistry-teacher-turned-drug-lord Walter White (Bryan Cranston), Gilligan doesn’t hold the hands of any viewer who...