Breach is a cat and mouse story, about two real people, an American spy who sells secrets to the Russians and his assistant whose job (along with a large team) it is to catch him.
The tension is unrelenting with not even a few seconds of comic relief.
Hanson, the spy, is an egotistical, paranoid genius, a sort of Sherlock Holmes type who considers every possibility and notices every detail. Oddly he is fanatical, proselytising Catholic. This made no sense to me. How could someone so involved in logic have been entrapped by the mumbo-jumbo of Catholicism? I gather the real world Hansen was.
The basic plot is will our young clerk avoid giving himself away to the master spy? Time pressure drives much of the plot, without being contrived.
Chris Cooper's Hansen is as memorable and strange as Hannibal Lecter. Ryan Phillippe usually plays bland exceedingly handsome young men. As Eric O'Neill, he is still handsome, but his character has much more depth and interest.
Some of the tech-talk was silly. Some of the computer screens were plagiarised from the Matrix.
They put the spy in charge of a new department two months before his retirement. This should have raised his suspicions. Apparently, it did not. His assistant seems to have nothing to do except drive a car every once in a while. To me, this makes no sense.
Most of the movie takes place in a grim windowless office.
The tension is unrelenting with not even a few seconds of comic relief.
Hanson, the spy, is an egotistical, paranoid genius, a sort of Sherlock Holmes type who considers every possibility and notices every detail. Oddly he is fanatical, proselytising Catholic. This made no sense to me. How could someone so involved in logic have been entrapped by the mumbo-jumbo of Catholicism? I gather the real world Hansen was.
The basic plot is will our young clerk avoid giving himself away to the master spy? Time pressure drives much of the plot, without being contrived.
Chris Cooper's Hansen is as memorable and strange as Hannibal Lecter. Ryan Phillippe usually plays bland exceedingly handsome young men. As Eric O'Neill, he is still handsome, but his character has much more depth and interest.
Some of the tech-talk was silly. Some of the computer screens were plagiarised from the Matrix.
They put the spy in charge of a new department two months before his retirement. This should have raised his suspicions. Apparently, it did not. His assistant seems to have nothing to do except drive a car every once in a while. To me, this makes no sense.
Most of the movie takes place in a grim windowless office.