Breach

last updated 8 January 2015

Breach is a strangely gray-toned thriller, said Tom Long in The Detroit News. It's the (mostly) true story of FBI agent Robert Hanssen, who fed information to the Soviets, and later the Russians, for 22 years until he was arrested in 2001. Hanssen was exposed by a young FBI agent, Eric O'Neill, planted to monitor his boss' illegal activities. Director Billy Ray tells the story through the eyes of O'Neill (Ryan Phillippe), skipping over Hanssen's actual treason to concentrate instead on his undoing. That leaves a film 'œfilled with tension, not excitement.' But day-to-day evil, not explosive spy action, makes this film fascinating, said Peter Rainer in The Christian Science Monitor. Chris Cooper's Hanssen is full of contradictions. He's a pious Catholic, an Internet pervert, and an American patriot whose very faith made him betray the system. Cooper's understated performance is 'œso rich that it deserves to be called novelistic.' Cooper is one of the best American actors in one of the year's best parts, said Scott Foundas in the L.A. Weekly. He shows us a new kind of villain—an empathetic character whose evil was born of the system. 'œBreach finally sees Hanssen less as an abject bogeyman—the Benedict Arnold of the millennium—than as a genetic mutation of the American success ethic.'

Rating: PG-13