Breach (HD DVD)

One of the special features on the Breach HD DVD should be enough of an example for me to tell you this is not a movie worth watching. Telling the story of Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent who was investigated and caught for espionage, this disc includes a 19 minute "Dateline" piece that pretty much sums up what this movie fails to do in an hour and 51 minutes. Unfortunately this is not an interesting enough story to tell in a movie as nothing really happens and then the fictitious moments added for dramatic value are the most poorly constructed moments in the film.

In Breach Chris Cooper portrays Robert Hanssen, a man linked to the Soviets as an FBI mole, and Eric O'Neill (Ryan Phillippe) a young agent has been brought in to get close to Hanssen and get the evidence needed to bring him down. Hanssen is a manipulative bastard, but instead of allowing the audience to figure that out you are told everything from the beginning. Nothing Hanssen does comes as a surprise except for a cliché moment toward the end of the film in which Hanssen begins to question O'Neill's loyalty resulting in a shouting match of, "Can I trust you?" to which O'Neill daftly replies, "CAN I TRUST YOU?!?!?!" This is one of the fictitious moments in the movie and if it was meant to add dramatic tension it didn't instead it gave me a laugh in the theater and a moment to ignore at home. Once an intelligent FBI agent acting as a spy for the Russians gets this suspicious about someone close to him you can pretty much guess what is going to happen next and it isn't going to be a maniacal shouting match in a nearby National Park.

Personally I think Chris Cooper is a fantastic actor, but when given a character with all the secrets revealed from the outset there is nothing he can do with it. I also like Ryan Phillippe, but his character was given some of the worst dialogue you can imagine and it ultimately turns into a series of scenes in which you can only furrow your brow and ask, "What is going on? Who talks like that?"

As for features you have the 2001 "Dateline" feature I mentioned earlier which profiles Hanssen and his subsequent demise, a look at Chris Cooper's performance as Hanssen in a moment of ass-kissery (oh yeah, and this one is brought to us by Volkswagen... thank God!), a making-of featurette that is nice and generic, a group of deleted/extended scenes and an audio commentary with writer/director Billy Ray and the real-life Eric O'Neill. Of the bunch the commentary is easily the most entertaining, but Ray talks so damned much that we don't get to hear enough of the real story from O'Neill, now that would have been educational, but I am thinking there just wasn't enough to talk about in this flat and relatively boring story.

I can't recommend you buy or even watch Breach, it is simply not entertaining and has no element of suspense whatsoever. Too much of the story is given away and you are left to just go through the motions as you already know what the outcome is going to be from the outset.