Breach is a cat and mouse story, about two real people, an American spy who sells secrets to the Russians and his assistant whose job (along with a large team) it is to catch him.The tension is unrelenting with not even a few seconds of comic relief.Hanson, the spy, is an egotistical, paranoid genius, a sort of Sherlock Holmes type who considers every possibility and notices every detail. Oddly he is fanatical, proselytising Catholic. This made no sense to me. How could someone so involved in logic have been entrapped by the mumbo-jumbo of Catholicism? I gather the real world Hansen was.The basic plot is will our young clerk avoid giving himself away to the master spy? Time pressure drives much of the plot, without being contrived.Chris Cooper's Hansen is as memorable and strange as Hannibal Lecter. Ryan Phillippe usually plays bland exceedingly handsome young men. As Eric O'Neill, he is still handsome, but his character has much more depth and interest.Some of the tech-talk was silly. Some of the computer screens were plagiarised from the Matrix.They put the spy in charge of a new department two months before his retirement. This should have raised his suspicions. Apparently, it did not. His assistant seems to have nothing to do except drive a car every once in a while. To me, this makes no sense.Most of the movie takes place in a grim windowless office.

This was pretty good for such a dry, slow-burning movie, it drags at times but still manages to keep a level of tension and suspense going throughout and I id end up really enjoying this. Ultimately it was the strong performances from both Chris Cooper and Ryan Phillippe that saved this for me.Cooper is intense and creepy here displaying a range of mystique. Laura Linney as his handler was quite bitchy. Ryan plays an FBI Trainee who is assigned to keep en eye on a fellow agent suspected of selling information to the soviets. Its his first real case and initially he's not even sure what he's looking for. 7/17/14

Breach (2007)The big arc here is the uncovering of a spy within the FBI, based on a true story. And that's interesting. But the movie works because of the mental and emotional sparring between the two leads. First is the spy, Robert Hanssen, played brilliantly by Chris Cooper. He pulls off the brilliance and eccentricity you might get with this kind of person, and all without stagy exaggeration. This is a spy and a spy story worthy of John Le Carre.Next to him is the young FBI worker, not yet an agent, Eric O'Neill, played by Ryan Phillippe. He's excellent enough to support Cooper, for sure, though he (maybe by necessity) is a more bland type. His struggle with why he (of all the FBI people possible) has been given the huge job of bringing this other man down is key to his depth.Both men have wives, and both women are good—Hanssen's wife is played by Kathleen Quinlan and though we don't see her much, she's really good. And generally the cast supports this chilling, dry, steady intrigue. In other ways, the movie is a bit conventional—professionally made, you might say, but without stylistic distinction. It's no breakthrough masterpiece. But what it tries to do telling this story it does with spare, direct force. This is no adventure tale —there is no real action. But that's good. It's compelling and interesting.Since this is "history" or "based on truth" it's worth saying that only the large facts are followed. All the fun movie stuff—the meeting of the wives, the pistol shooting in two scenes, the sex stuff, and so on—are all invented. Apparently life is either too dull or too dangerous to really put on film.But that's okay. It's a strong story. And Cooper steals the day.

Chris Cooper is brilliant. The screenwriter and director have done a very good job of storytelling in one of those situations where you have seen the TV Newsmagazine treatment and you know who did it and how it ends. (spoiler alerts not applicable for this one.) This movie has a very strong cast including Laura Linney, Dennis Haysbert, Ryan Philippe, Gary Cole and Kathleen Quinlan - who all give their usual solid interpretations. But to me, Cooper stands out with a truly memorable performance, pardon my cliché.Watch this movie if, like me you passed it over because you had seen it in the news. The suspense, detail and different angles of perspective will amaze you.