Secretly Awesome - Breakdown

Release Date: May 2, 1997

Director: Jonathan Mostow

Writers: Jonathan Mostow, Sam Montgomery

Cast: Kurt Russel, Katleen Quinlan, J.T. Walsh, Jack Noseworthy, M.C. Gainey

Box Office: $50,159,144

Rotten Tomatoes: 79%

Buy It!

Breakdown is something of a rarity. It's pure suspense. The plot is thin, the characters are pretty much two-dimensional, and the motivations are always clear from the start. Simply saying that the end justifies the means wouldn't do Breakdown any justice, nor would it give writer/director Jonathan Mostow the credit he deserves, because Mostow makes such perfect use out of these means that adding depth or backstory, or sub-plots would just screw the whole thing up. It's sharp, concise, and always gets right to the point; dialogue is only spoken when necessary, but most of it is just a high-wire act set at top-speed on moving vehicles.

I sat down several months ago expecting a dirt-ball action movie to have on in the background while I surfed the internet, but ended up watching the film for ten or fifteen minutes at a time, until I finally gave up trying to surf and closed my laptop about forty minutes into the film. When I looked it up on imdb earlier today, I saw that I had rated it a four out of ten, based on my memory of seeing it when it came out. Ashamed, I quickly changed it to a ten. It is that good. I turned it on to refresh my memory while I write this, and had to pause it at the 42:20 mark because I hadn't even logged into the site yet. It is completely absorbing.

The plot is this: Kurt Russel and his wife, played by Kathleen Quinlan, are moving out West, and their car breaks down in the middle of the desert. A trucker offers to take Quinlan to a truck stop to call a tow-truck and kidnaps her. The rest of the movie is a frightened Kurt Russel running around frantically through the desert looking for her. It's not concerned with twists and turns, no big shocks or revelations; it's all laid out pretty simply in the first fifteen minutes, and the rest is watching Russel unravel as he becomes more and more desperate, isolated in a world he knows nothing of, amongst truckers and red-necks who don't care about him or his situation, with nowhere and nobody to turn to. It's beautiful.

And when I say that these characters are two-dimensional, I don't mean that it doesn't take any skill to play them. On the contrary, there are some brilliant performances not only from Russel and Quinlan, but also from J.T. Walsh, Jack Noseworthy, and M.C. Gainey as the group of seedy truckers who prey on his initial trust. Nobody in the late 90s played a shady villain like J.T. Walsh, and nobody played the ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances like Kurt Russel, who has the right physique and the perfect blend of intelligence and naiveté to pull of the everyman who gets in further and further over his head.

Mostow's direction is near-perfect. It's not showy or overly stylized, and he doesn't hide behind fast cuts when it comes to the action. He's more interested in bleeding a scene or situation dry of its inherent tension. At the 42:20 mark there have really only been a handful of scenes, which are dragged out to achieve their full potential. It's full of scenes that make Russel seem crazy to anyone who could help him, or long shots of him against an empty desert to highlight his isolation. That's the type of pace Mostow sets. It's not a typical action film, with a big set-piece delivered every twenty minutes. It's slow, it takes its time. There is a sequence later in the film that is just Russel climbing from the bottom of a moving truck's trailer to a safer spot in-between the truck itself and the trailer, where he can stand until the truck stops. It lasts for three full minutes, and it's just him struggling and grunting, trying not to be seen by the driver... and holy shit is it tense. And as I believe all great 90s action films should end in a crazy location, so ends Breakdown, but I won't give it away. See it for yourself.

Sorry for the awful trailer quality. It was the only one I could find.

Secretly Awesome - Event Horizon

Release Date: August 15, 1997

Director: Paul W.S. Anderson

Writer: Philip Eisner

Cast: Sam Neill, Laurence Fishburne, Jason Isaacs, Kathleen Quinlan, Joely Richardson, Richard T. Jones, Jack Noseworthy

Box Office: $26,673,242

Rotten Tomatoes: 21%

Buy It!

Event Horizon follows a rescue team on a mission to investigate what happened to a portal-jumping space-ship that has just re-appeared after it was missing for seven years. It turns out the ship has been to some Hellish dimension and brought back some kind of energy force that drives people insane, and when the rescue team arrives, they find the bloody remains of the ship's crew. What may sound like a routine B-movie turns out to have some top-notch production value, a cast of under-used character actors, and some surprisingly reserved direction from none other than Paul W.S. Anderson, the man responsible for the Resident Evil franchise, which is anything but reserved.

The first hour of Event Horizon is all tension build-up, and surprisingly effective build-up at that. Sure, we learn all of the things we expect to learn, and quickly realize that the crew members will be separated through a strange sequence of events and picked off one-by-one in the end, but what makes Event Horizon different is its amazing set design and art direction, as well as some eerie lighting effects. There's something creepy in every room and every corridor that sets a very unsettling tone that the rest of the film keeps pace with for a while, as the crew explore the ship, and come across places like the hatch that opens up into the green ventilation shaft maze. As this goes on, we start to see the crew's waking nightmares, which cause them to do some crazy things until the whole thing devolves into a big, bloody death-trap. And I say "devolve" there with love, because the last half hour is actually pretty satisfyingly gory.

A lot of this could have been terrible (I'd be interested to read the screenplay to see how bad it might be), but it was really well-cast. The actors take the material seriously enough and deliver the expository dialogue with enough gravity for me to be more than willing to suspend disbelief. And Anderson's direction is pretty subtle at times; he lets a lot of moments play out slowly, sometimes almost painfully slowly, like a scene in which a possessed crew-mate goes into the cargo bay with the intention of opening the hatch into space. The scene lasts for minutes as the powerless crew try to talk him down. It's pretty intense. And of course, Event Horizon ends like a 90s action film should, with a showdown in a random location. In this case, Fishburne faces a demonic ripped-faced Sam Neill in a literal bloodbath at the base of a spherical room which holds a spinning orb-like multi-dimensional portal, which is on fire. Not to be missed.