Netflix Review: Breach (2007)

"What are you doing in this movie with me?"

Is this the way you would use Chris Cooper? They might as well have cast him in Broken Arrow 2.

Breach

Suggested Netflix Queue Position: 76, just ahead of Saw II

Imagine you’re a producer and that you have been given the green light to make a movie. It’s a movie about disgraced CIA spy Robert Hanssen. You’re able to get Academy Award caliber actors Chris Cooper and Laura Linney to star.

Sounds like a pretty good deal, huh? A naturally riveting story, anchored by two great actors. How could you possibly screw this up? Well, casting Ryan Phillippe is a good start. I don’t have anything against the guy, it’s just that he’s not a very good actor. I don’t know how he’s managed to be in some pretty strong films: Flags of Our Fathers, Gosford Park and Crash. He must have one hell of an agent.

But Breach, while a disappointment, certainly doesn’t suffer from poor acting on the whole. Cooper, as Hanssen, is compelling as the conflicted spy, and Linney, who continues to be underrated, turns in a strong performance as callous agent Kate Burroughs. But here’s where Phillippe, as fledgling agent Eric O’Neill, sticks out - and not in a good way. It’s clear that alongside these two heavyweights, Phillippe is in over his head. He thinks he’s in a spy thriller; Cooper and Linney think they’re in a character study.

To give you an idea of the uneven playing field evident here, this would be like…well, like casting Ryan Phillippe opposite two Oscar-worthy actors.

But you can’t lay the blame for this underachievement entirely at Phillippe’s feet. In fact, you can’t even blame him for his character choices in playing O’Neill. Why? Because Director Billy Ray, along with writers Adam Mazer and William Rotko, turn this into a clichéd spy thriller. So it’s not as if Phillippe’s acting is even out of context here.

O’Neill, a new agent, is sent to work alongside Hanssen by Burroughs. Very quickly, the kid discovers that he’s not just working alongside Hanssen – he’s there to track him and gather information because Hanssen is thought to be selling secrets to national enemies.

Why, when building a case against a dangerous traitor, would they send a clueless new agent to gather the evidence? Good question. They try to explain it away in the movie, but it doesn’t quite hold water.

What follows isn’t the character chess match we should be seeing, but a series of trite spy scenes, complete with O’Neill sneaking around Hanssen’s office looking through his bags and computer data, etc., against the backdrop of a canned, faux-suspenseful spy score, while Hanssen is just down the hall but on his way back. Do you think O’Neill will get out of his office in time?? Hanssen, by the way, is supposed to never miss a detail about anything.

Is this the way you would use Chris Cooper? They might as well have cast him in Broken Arrow 2. The thing is, Ray actually begins to scratch the surface for what this whole complicated internal web means to the individual characters. Linney’s Burroughs is quite hardened from the strain of internal surveillance. O’Neill is just getting his first taste of such strain – and isn’t sure if he’s cut out for it. Hanssen is on an entirely different level of strain. This, along with the base story, presents more than enough material to build an intelligent, original film. It just doesn’t happen.

Let me be clear: Breach isn’t a bad movie. It’s just an underachievement when you consider the talent assembled and the material featured. This is one of the biggest spy scandals in U.S. history, along with a very talented pair of actors.

How could you screw this up again?