In short: U-571 (2000)

World War II. The crew – including Matthew McConaughey in his “young star” phase, Harvey Keitel in his “Harvey Keitel” phase, and Jon Bon Jovi in his perpetual “can’t act” phase -  of the submarine of Lt. Cmdr. Mike Dahlgren (Bill Paxton) is sent on a top secret surprise mission to use a lucky opportunity to grab an Enigma Machine from a German U-Boot.

Things do of course become more complicated than that, and soon the US submarine is destroyed and most of its crew killed, with only a handful of men under the command of XO McConaughey alive on a German U-Boot that has seen better days. More tense complications do of course ensue during the attempt to get the Enigma Machine in allied hands.

This is the other diamond in the otherwise naff crown of director Jonathan Mostow, standing at eye level to his pretty damn great Breakdown. In fact, his two good films are so good, I can’t help but think the director must have been exceedingly unlucky with outside forces on his other projects, for the kind of talent for suspense and tense action his two excellent films demonstrate can’t have been a fluke. Obviously, the script Mostow’s working from is of dubious historical authenticity (if you want to know about the actual way Enigma was cracked, Wikipedia and a bunch of sources mentioning many people from exotic countries like Poland, France, and the UK this film has never heard about apart from a tiny mention once the plot is over beckon), and its characters are cut from very typical genre movie cloth.


However, the script does know how to make its shorthand characters just lively enough for an audience to care about their fate, and provides the damn great cast many a good opportunity to sweat and stare dramatically without the plot ever getting bogged down in melodramatics. Instead, things always feel tight, tense and teetering on the edge of catastrophe, Mostow using all tricks of the thriller-style war movie to do a very classic thing: dragging his audience to the edge of their seats. It does help here that the film, despite its historical inauthenticity, is the kind of war adventure that very well knows that war isn’t actually an adventure, so this isn’t only showing heroic pursuits, but men following these pursuits while in desperate fear for their lives, everybody quickly coming to the edge of their respective breaking points. Which, obviously, enhances the tension Mostow creates through masterful staging and editing of the suspense quite a bit.

Breakdown (1997)

After their brand new car breaks down on a desert highway, married couple Amy (Kathleen Quinlan) and Jeff Taylor (Kurt Russell) feel lucky when a friendly trucker (J.T. Walsh) pops up only a couple of moments later. Because the car is full with their stuff (they are moving), the plan is for Amy to let the trucker drive her to a relatively close diner where she can organize help while Jeff stays by the car.

Alas, Amy never returns, and the Taylors’ car trouble turns out to be suspiciously easy to solve once Jeff looks at the right place. You know, it looks just like the sort of thing somebody could have done to a car while its owners where away paying for gas. With his freshly self-repaired car, Jeff makes his way to the diner, but nobody there has seen his wife, the trucker, or knows anything about anything, really. After some back and forth with the locals and the unhelpful police, all of which increases his paranoia mightily, Jeff will learn that his wife has been kidnapped by that nice trucker and some of his friends, who have their own brand of highway robbery going on. Fortunately, Jeff is played by Kurt Russell.

If one were of a mind too - and I have indeed read this in a couple of older write-ups of the film - one could certainly be annoyed about the way Jonathan Mostow’s Breakdown uses Kathleen Quinlan’s character mostly as a McGuffin in its plot instead of a character with much agency. But then, it’s mostly the bad guys here who actually treat her this way (and one could argue that her dropping a truck on J.T. Walsh at the end demonstrates Amy’s feelings concerning this matter quite well) – Jeff just goes to bat for a person he loves in the only way that seems open to him. Mostow also couldn’t really avoid this kind of accusation without making a completely different film, for showing Amy doing things to free herself, or really showing anything of what happens to her, would open up the limited perspective the audience and Jeff share, and on which much of the film’s initial tension is based on. As a matter of fact, Amy does certain things to stay alive longer; how this affects Jeff, the film rather elegantly demonstrates later on in practice.

But enough about that, for most of my very mild annoyance about the kidnapped woman trope stopped early on thanks to the sheer conviction of Mostow’s film. There’s such an elegant flow, and such a believable tension coming with the escalation of Jeff’s troubles and emotional state – from confusion, to anger, to total paranoia, to increasing violence – that more abstract considerations just stopped for me after half an hour or so. Breakdown is full of clever little moments and gestures to show how much out of his depth Jeff is. The early film portrays him as your typical upper middle-class guy who has trouble effectively communicating with anyone from the working class beyond economical transactions, sending out exactly the wrong signals to everyone he meets and seemingly unable to read those around him. In fact, the film hints it is this behaviour that has gotten the Taylors in trouble at first. It will, however, turn out it isn’t a backwoods horror family threatening them but just a couple of guys with a disturbingly casual relationship to violence who see the Taylors as easy prey because of quite different signals sent by both of them.


Which then leads to a tense, expertly timed, and tightly staged series of escalating chase and action sequences that should really bring anyone watching right onto the proverbial edges of their seats. Breakdown is as good a mid-budget action thriller as you’ll probably encounter, tight and clever, changing pace and shape with verve and always at just the right moment, further improved by a fine cast in a very good mood.