Reviews by Matt

In 2001, the FBI finally caught the biggest trader in the history of the United States. “Breach” is the story of how Robert Hanssen (Chris Cooper) finally got caught. He had been working for the FBI for almost 25 years and selling secrets to the Russians for almost as long. The FBI knew that he was doing this, but did not have anything that would hold up in court. They tapped Eric O’Neil (Ryan Phillippe) to bring him down. O’Neil was an FBI upstart who wanted to become an agent and he knew this chance was a guaranteed fast track that position. The only thing standing in his way is outsmarting the man who had been outsmarting the FBI for years.

Chris Cooper has spent his career under the radar. Even though he has won an Oscar, he still is not a household name. The majority of his career has been spent playing the supporting character and has been doing it well, in some cases out shining his more popular counterpart. He does it again in “Breach.” Hanssen is a complex character. He is a religious man who is also a sexual deviant, a quiet man who hides a horrible secret. He pays attention to every detail and can read people like a book. When he first meets O’Neil, he asks him to list five things about himself, one of them a lie. O’Neil lists the five with no hesitation. Where he went to school, that he got all badges in boy scouts except archery, his favorite drink is vodka and so on. Hanssen looks him in dead in the eye and says, “So what IS your favorite drink?” Even with all the bad things the viewers know about him, you just cannot hate the man. It is a credit to Cooper as an actor. He can play even the most evil character and still give him a heart.

Ryan Phillippe has never really impressed me much. Maybe it is because I feel sorry that Reese Witherspoon dumped him for her Oscar, but lately he has really impressed me. He always seemed like a cold, humorless guy. Every time I saw him he had a straight face and looked like he was mad at someone. Then, when I looked at his IMDb profile, I saw he was in Outkast’s video for “Hey Ya” (yes, I checked and it is him and he is actually kind of funny). He has also been is some great movies lately. I saw him in “Crash” and “Flags of Our Fathers” and saw that he could actually act and now I just can’t muster up the distaste for him anymore. He is a surprisingly good actor and I have got to say that I was wrong about him. In this movie he has to lie to Hanssen, his wife and anyone else not directly involved in the case. He has to outwit a man who has been doing it for years and has not got caught. All of this stress takes its toll on his marriage. Phillippe is as good in this role as he has been in the past year and is on his way to being more then the former Mr. Witherspoon.

This movie is like “Titanic” in that you know how it is going to end. The movie opens with then U.S Attorney General, John Ashcroft, announcing capture of Hanssen, but that does not take the drama out of it. There are a few interesting twists and turns that could lead anywhere. Hanssen is so careful that you wonder just how he got caught. Cooper and Phillippe play off each other really well and give this movie the tension that it is always on the verge of losing. It is one of those movies that will go unnoticed because it doesn’t have big name actors, big explosions and is based very much on the characters and not the special effects.

7 out of 10
Rated PG-13 for violence, sexual content and language.
110 min