Butler's Cinema Scene

“BREAKING” My rating: B (In theaters)

103 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

At some point early in the riveting “Breaking” most viewers are going to say to themselves that John Boyega is the new Denzel.

By the time the film is over they’ll be thinking that Denzel is the old John Bpyega.

The British Boyega has covered a lot of territory in just a few years on screen, from being a regular in the “Star Wars” universe to playing an alien-battling London punk in “Attack the Block” and an African American security guard with a conscience in Kathryn Bigelow’s “Detroit.”

If starring as a rebel Imperial storm trooper made Boyega a household name in some quarters, his performance in “Breaking” should sling him into the ranks of  Oscar contenders.  

As Brian Brown-Easley, a real-life Marine veteran undergoing a mental-emotional meltdown, Boyega gives a performance that is by turns subtle, in your face and heartbreaking.

For its first 30 minutes writer/director Abi Damaris Corbin’s film is basically a three-character drama unfolding in real time.  In a setup that will remind many of “Dog Day Afternoon,”  Boyega’s character walks into an Atlanta-area bank and passes a teller a note announcing that his backpack contains a bomb.

But it’s not a robbery.  We soon learn that Brian is at the end of his rope because his monthly veteran’s benefit has been seized by a collection agency to cover the unpaid tuition incurred in his brief and disastrous attempt at a college education. As his last stand he’s decided to hold the bank hostage until the media gets his story out and he gets his money back.

As hostage situations go, this one is unsettling for its civility.  Brian lets everyone in the bank leave save for a cashier (Selenis Leyva) and the branch manager (Nicole Beharie). And despite waving around what he claims is a detonator (looks like he assembled it with parts from the junk drawer), Brian fights his own peaking anxiety to present himself as polite and non-threatening…or at least as non-threatening as one can be in these circumstances.

In fact, Brian finds an ally of sorts in the manager, who turns down an opportunity to escape because she figures she’s all that’s between this desperate fellow and a sniper’s bullet.  The cashier, on the other hand, is perennially poised on the edge of hysteria.

Little by little the screenplay by Corbin and Kame Kwei-Armah introduces other characters. There’s a police hostage negotiator (the late Michael Kenneth Williams) who must work his away around a shoot-first commanding officer (Jeffrey Donovan) and  a new police chief determined to establish his bona fides as tough on crime.

Brian manages to get a call through to a news producer (Connie Britton) at a local TV station.

And periodically he rings up his estranged wife (Olivia Washington) and their precocious young daughter (London Covington), whose home has been invaded by a couple of grimly unhelpful FBI agents. 

“Breaking” moves with a sort of grim inevitability, balancing fear and suspense against Brian’s desperation.  And while everyone in the film is solid, Boyega’s performance is a tour de force as it shifts back and forth between depression, hope, anger, guilt…there are few emotional bases this young actor doesn’t tag here.

It’s one of those performances you’ll want to see twice, just to figure out how he pulled it off.

| Robert W. Butler