BREAKDOWN
I hope a sequel's called Breakdown 2: Electric Boogaloo
Hey, I told you I was putting off my In The Mouth Of Madness review. It's gonna be long. And until then, I'm trying to put as many reviews between me and it, this probably being the last.
It might not be technically a horror movie, but it's constructed like a cross between Duel, The Vanishing, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, so that's enough for me today. Breakdown is a super-creepy little movie that kind of slipped under most people's radar when it came out, definitely a superior "regular guy pushed to the edge" movie.
Kurt Russell stars as Jeff Tanner, a man driving through the Utah desert with his wife Amy (Kathleen Quinlan) in their brand new SUV. They nearly hit a pickup truck in a moment of inattention, but keep driving to avoid a confrontation. At a gas station further down the road, that confrontation - all verbal, lucky for him - takes place, but it looks like the Marolboro Man driving the truck is likely to leave them alone for the time being. They drive off, but the SUV breaks down after a little while for unknown reasons. The first vehicle to drive by? The truck, which blasts by with hoots and hollers of derision. Then about a mile down the road, it stops, turns around, and waits.
To the rescue comes the driver of an eighteen-wheeler (Red Barr, played by J.T. Walsh. Think this guy's from Baton Rouge?), who pulls up, helps push the SUV off of the road, and offers them a ride to a nearby diner to get a tow. Jeff is reluctant to leave the truck alone, having already made an enemy, but his wife volunteers to take that ride, and the two drive off into the distance. After a lengthy wait that comes to nothing, Jeff gets the SUV started on his own and finds that nobody at the diner had seen her. He finds the eighteen-wheeler and pulls it over, and when he asks the trucker repeatedly about his wife, he is looked straight in the face and told "Look, I don't know how to tell you this, but I've never seen you before in my life."
That's all I want to give away; more would be massive spoilage, except it's probably a good bet that Jeff isn't going insane and that Mr. Barr is nowhere near as benevolent as he seems. Breakdown unfolds as one of those movies that kept me smiling and biting my knuckles almost nonstop.
Russell is a smart casting choice here, easily able to pull off being both an everyman and, for lack of a better term, an action hero, although what we see Jeff do is closer to panic and desperation than what we generally see from action heroes. Quinlan doesn't get much to do. But Walsh - this was one character actor who turned in a LOT of really great performances in his day, and I can't think of any better than this one. You get to see all these facets to his character, and they all work together even if they seem incongruous just to hear about. To say more gives too much away.
The plot, I've alternately heard described with about equal frequency as "full of holes" and "airtight". Uh-huh. I wouldn't say HOLES, but there are a couple of unlikely moments, usually affecting nothing, thankfully (like the discovery of a junk food wrapper). (plot holes bother me less when they don't actually serve to move the story to its conclusion)
Many have expressed reservations about the setup for this film; I don't agree with them. There are any number of reasons a man might let his wife go off with a stranger for a ride for help like this. Maybe he's just too cheap to leave the SUV; maybe the last time he told her what she couldn't do she wouldn't sleep with him for a month. Maybe (oh, here's a shocker) he TRUSTS her, both as his wife and as somebody who, in as many situations as he, can take care of herself. As for the setup depending on the Tannerses doing exactly what they did in order for the film to unfold properly, well, chances are there were a lot of couples who didn't do just what they did. I think this movie's more interesting than would be one made about one of the other couples.
And the ending? The title, of course, stands for not only a state of automotive disrepair but our protagonist's descent from civility into violence as he sets out to find his wife. It's because of this title that I think I'm the only person in the world who likes the implications of the climactic moment; obviously, Jeff isn't the only one who's been breaking down.
Breakdown is a quick 95 minutes and only seems overdone with a difficult method of boarding that eighteen-wheeler, and a climactic four-vehicle chase, which is still so superbly executed that I'd rank it among my favorite car chases anyway. Autos flying through other autos, flips, smashing, crashing...hey, the best car chase of the 1990's, for my money. And finally, when one particular auto crashes into a ravine, it just crashes. It doesn't explode. And the impact seems all the more thunderous for it. Even though one car that doesn't crash into the ravine does.
This is a thriller that relies on unrelenting tension and speculation for its thrills; the violence isn't overdone, the characters are compelling, and the situations believable even when things are obviously getting out of hand. I'd recommend it to anybody, and how many movies can you say that about? I don't know how this escaped being a big hit.
Breakdown was directed and cowritten by Jonathan Mostow, who previously directed Beverly Hills Bodysnatchers. Never seen it. But he's directing that "Jon Bon Jovi in a U-boat" movie coming out soon, and I can't believe I'm looking forward to a movie starring Jon Bon Jovi.