I always thought this was an excellent piece of work, a topical and paranoid political thriller that valued character and logic over needless action and manufactured heroics. Billy Ray is a smart and talented storyteller, and as usual, Chris Cooper and Laura Linney were both absolutely great. Cooper in particular turned in an anguished performance, and was robbed of Academy consideration. Why was this film released in February and not in October or November? But the biggest surprise was how good pretty-boy Ryan Phillippe was at playing a sketched-out, low-level office clerk who gets in way over his head with his secrets-stealing boss. The film has an appropriately ice-cold visual atmosphere (the brilliant Tak Fujimoto was the film’s ace cinematographer) and fleet pacing due to Jeffrey Ford’s tight editing, while the crispness of Ray’s intelligent screenplay, which he co-wrote with Adam Mazer and William Rotko, favors words over bullets as the ultimate weapons.
Ray has had a great career as a writer, with the underrated WWII drama Hart’s War and creepy serial killer thriller Suspect Zero ranking as two cool screenplay credits, while recently, he contributed to the underappreciated State of Play remake by Kevin Macdonald and penned the riveting Captain Phillips for action auteur Paul Greengrass. He’s also responsible for writing and directing one of the best journalism thrillers of all time, the highly engrossing Shattered Glass, which is woefully undervalued, and features conclusive proof that Hayden Christensen is capable of a great performance. Breach tells a true story and does it with confidence and smarts, taking the audience into a shadowy world of government mystery and personal betrayal, and with Cooper’s sturdy performance anchoring the entire piece and an emotionally wrenching finale, this is a ripped-from-the-headlines thriller that truly deserves a Blu-ray upgrade – get on it Universal!
Podcasting Them Softly 