Breach

• Directed by John Suits
• December 18, 2020

A ship of survivors of a plague on Earth are travelling to the colony of New Earth and must confront a malevolent life form that has come aboard the ship.

There is a lot of terrible in Breach. The only reason to watch it is Bruce Willis and he’s not good enough in this film to justify watching it. Did he even rehearse? I cannot say for sure but it does not appear so.

Willis has gone the direct to video route and he is just not special enough to be thought of fondly while putting out junk. Is he having money troubles or is he an actor that nobody wants to work with because he is too difficult?

Nicolas Cage on the other hand has managed to maintain a positive presence in the minds of many despite his significant direct to video output not being up to the quality of his output before his money troubles. Then again, he’s a very unique performer and his performance does at times elevate his work. He will take an okay project and make it better. Bruce Willis is no Nicolas Cage. I’ve heard him described as the poor man’s Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone. Whatever you want to call him, he certainly doesn’t have a charisma that can make material better.

I have never seen an actor look more disinterested in a single film than I have Bruce Willis look in this movie. He’s just going through the motions here. He is clearly bored and just generally indifferent to the material he has to work with.

Willis’s character of Clay Young has two defining characteristics: he’s generally angry and he drinks excessively from a flask he carries on him at all times. They set up a rivalry between Clay and Commander Stanley (Timothy V. Murphy) but nothing ever really comes of it. Such a thing is usually a clue of who the main character is and from whom they will need to take control from but not so when it comes to the biggest name in the film.

You would think that considering Bruce Willis is in this he would be playing the main character, but you would be wrong. The main character is some no name actor called Cody Kearsley playing an individual called Noah. And the ship is called The Ark. Laying it on thick here.

Kearsley was on the show Riverdale. That makes him important enough to be the boring focus. There must have been somebody better.

In Breach there is a plague ravaging the planet, but the type of disease is very vague. It’s implied that this disease has infected most of the planet and is extremely contagious but there are no apparent precautions taken to isolate the passengers boarding the ship from the general population of the planet. That is obvious in the opening moments of the movie.

It is also never really explained how they make the choice of who can and cannot go to New Earth. For example, the admiral’s (Thomas Jane) daughter (Kassandra Clementi), who is pregnant with Noah’s baby, appears to not be guaranteed a spot. You would think SHE would get a spot easy.

Breach tries to be an action horror movie but it’s not scary and the action really isn’t that good. The alien monster causes people to leap in the air but beyond that things are rather tepid. Our “heroes” kinda lumber around and casually fight the monsters. There is not much of an attempt to make them look concerned over things.

This is done on the extreme cheap. Think looking for money in the cushions of your couch cheap. The alien monster is a knock off of the black oil thing from X-Files. Here it dissolves the insides of the body and wears the skin like a suit. The fact that it keeps the proportions exactly the same really bothers me. There’s just a change in skin tone and black stains around the mouth but no physical distortions. I know this is a cheap movie but maybe have the characters walk funny. Something to indicate that everything inside their bodies is missing!

X-Files is not the only fictional universe that gets referenced. They take from Star Trek and even Alien. Not only is this an alien that spends part of its poorly defined life cycle in a body, but it eventually turns into something else that is a ferocious predator that they decide to use flamethrowers on. And that’s after they decide “No” for reasons.

Noah, arguably our central character who gets pushed repeatedly into the background, and his girlfriend manage to make it to the colony of 50 million only to learn that the alien zombie black liquid virus was already there and had taken out the entire colony which begs the question: why was it brought onto the last colony ship to begin with?

This alien organism was being used by a rebel faction that felt that humanity had its chance and failed so it shouldn’t go anywhere else and was seeking to stop attempts to colonize other parts of the galaxy. Either the disease was native to that planet and they brought it back or they introduced the disease to that planet. Regardless if it was already there in one form or another then why all this effort to introduce it to the ship? This goal would get accomplished with absolutely no effort on anybody’s part.

The sets are okay but generic. It looks as if they built as few sets as possible and re-purposed the ones they did have in as many ways as necessary. That’s not a bad strategy for cost saving but you do need to work a little harder to dress up the sets when you repurpose them. You need props and some set decoration. Other sets look like they put up cheap paneling from plastic storage containers and a little light in the back.

The dialogue is mediocre to bad. It sounds as if a great deal this film’s dialogue was improvised. Improvisation does not always work. And the performances are rather bad. Most everybody looks like they regret being in this movie other than the actor playing Noah. He looks thrilled but then again this probably the biggest group of stars he ever worked with.

Bruce Willis, Rachel Nichols, and Callan Mulvey have both been in better projects and it is clear this is part of a significant career downturn that all are bothered by. Callan Mulvey looked depressed but gave it his all in comparison to Willis.

Breach is a cheap film that suffers from its cheapness as well as performances by actors that would rather be doing anything else in a mediocre, poorly thought-out story. You can certainly skip this one.