Breach (USA, 2020)

(Spoilers.) A.k.a. Anti-Life. Hey! To simply steal the entire opening paragraph from our review of Force of Nature (2020): "Towards the end of his life, Sir Laurence Olivier (22 May 1907 – 11 Jul 1989), one of England's great thespians, was known, during his later years of declining health, to take pretty much every half-way decently paying project that came his way — The Betsy (1978 / trailer), anyone? — ostentatiously because in his later years he 'devoted himself to making money for his children and grandchildren' [Harvard Crimson]. He was/is hardly a rarity in his desire to rake in the dough before going six feet under. More recently, Bruce Willis, prior to and during his decent into dementia, pretty much did the same thing, filling his probably already healthy bank account with bucks earned from headlining but shot-in-two-days appearances in a plethora of third and fourth rate 'geezer teasers' [...] before, well, he got to the point that 2-million-dollar, 15-minute parts were no longer an option."

Indeed, by the time Bruce got around to filming Out of Death (2021 / trailer) in November 2020, famously (or perhaps infamously) enough, Mike Burns, the director of that tax write-off, felt compelled to reduce Willis's dialogue to a minimum because the actor no longer seemed to know what he was doing (LA Times).

Trailer to

Breach:

While filming Breach, on the other hand, in September and October 2019, Willis could obviously still remember lines, for though he is hardly the lead — regardless of how the trailer makes it look like — he still has a relatively large amount of dialogue and, actually, does a fairly decent off-the-cuff, almost dryly and comically camp, performance as the manly senior janitor, Clay. Willis seems to know he's in a crap film, and his apparent lack of respect for his own part serves his character well.

Of course, it could also simply be that the true lead of the movie, the extremely uncharismatic Cody Kearsley (of River Road [2022 / trailer]), as the stowaway pretending to be a janitor, Noah, is so miscast and offers such a piss-poor performance that Willis comes across almost Shakespearean when sleepwalking. Other familiar faces (such as Ralf Moeller and Thomas Jane) add some mild enjoyment to the movie, although one does really get the feeling that their given appearance is probably due to either a lack of decent film offers or a desperate need to pay rent (or, maybe, like Betsy Palmer in the original Friday the 13th [1980 / trailer], they each simply want a new car).

Breach is a contemporary science fiction horror film, a distant cousin of films like Creature (1985) or Forbidden World (1982), both of which probably cost a lot less than Breach to make and are sleazier and more fun and much better films in every way. Like those movies, the basic narrative concerns an apparently unstoppable monster aboard a spaceship — in Forbidden World, to be exact, aboard a planetary space station — decimating the crew as the dwindling number of survivors tries both to survive and destroy it.

Here, the spaceship, the Ark, is a huge vessel carrying some 300,000 people in suspended animation to a new world (called "New Earth") from the doomed old Earth. No everyone aboard, however, believes that mankind is worth saving or deserves a second chance on a new planet, so they smuggle an infectious parasite aboard. Soon after hatching, the parasite begins infecting those on the vessel, converting them into unstoppable zombie-like killers before, eventually, absorbing them to become a tacky-looking, ever-growing monster. (Odd how, some 60+ years after grindhouse projects like Creature and Forbidden World, a project like Breach still cannot manage to make a monster that looks even half-way as real or scary as the one found in the original Alien [1979 / trailer] and its numerous sequels. But to give credit where credit is due: the critter looks better in the film stills than in the film itself.)

Breach is probably at its tensest and ickiest in the scene of the first infection (a scene that calls back ever so slightly to movies such as Night of the Creeps [1986] and Shivers [1975 / trailer]), but once the creature is ingested little that follows is frightening, surprising or suspenseful. Instead, most of what happens is unintentionally funny or oddly illogical, and by the film's expected (as in: you see it coming miles away) resolution, one is truly left with a deep sense of disappointment. All the more so because the movie conveys the feeling that it could have possibly been good, had it only been made correctly.

In itself, as old as the basic narrative is, it does offer the skeletal structure for a good story if handled well; likewise, as crappy as Breach is, it does have a few good ideas — for example, the way the exploded dead slide back together to regenerate into a bigger (but unluckily, funnier and less-effective looking) monster is pretty nifty. The problem is that the filmmakers simply drop the ball once too often, and nothing seems to gel into a coherent or effective horror or action movie. The movie takes too long to get moving, is amazingly empty of atmosphere or tension, and the simplest of logic is often missing. All things that other movies have managed to overcome, but generally thanks to a solid and charismatic main character, if not some creative filmic technique, things that Breach sorely lacks.

One can only scratch their head, for example, that although Noah has discovered the only way to truly destroy the infected, he doesn't bother to share the knowledge with Admiral Adams (Thomas Jane of 1922 [2017], Mutant Chronicles [2008] and Nemesis [1992]) and his unit when they are awoken from cryosleep to fight the monster. Likewise, the sudden revelation that Teek [Callan Mulvey, of Miss Meadows (2014 / trailer)], is the hidden saboteur is a hard pill to swallow as, up until the revelation, he has seriously and fully tried everything possible to fight and stop the situation faced. His revelations, the arguments of which in themselves carry some sense of verisimilitude, would have been far more believable had they been revealed by someone else at some other point in the narrative. (Although, hell, real zealots can actually hide their true fanatic intentions well enough if they want to — Republicans, for example, did it for years before MAGA raised its fascist head.)

Breach: a crappy movie with a few misplayed good ideas, a watchable and almost camp Bruce Willis, a totally wasted Thomas Jane, a totally uncharismatic lead identification figure (i.e., Cody Kearsley), and a surprising surplus of predictability and lack of suspense. The movie's resolution and final lines of dialogue, in any event, are truly hilarious. If you bother to watch Breach, we can only recommend to do so as a group and with a lot of beer and weed, for without the group experience Breach is still too new a movie to be enjoyed as the bad movie that it is, and for which it might perhaps gain a minor reputation in a decade or two. (Doubtful, actually.)