Director – John Suits, Screenplay – Edward Drake & Corey Large, Producers – Corey Large & Danny Roth, Photography – Will Stone, Music – Scott Glasgow, Visual Effects – Aldea VFX (Supervisor – Daniel Calvo), Special Effects Supervisor/Makeup Effects Designer – Roy Knyrim, Production Design – David Dean Ebert & Melissa Woods. Production Company – 308 Entertainment/Almost Never Films/A7 Entertainment/Chalkboard Sumer Camp/Aloe Entertainment.
Cast
Cody Kearsley (Noah Corel), Bruce Willis (Clay), Rachel Nichols (Dr Susan Chambers), Timothy V. Murphy (Commander Stanley), Kassandra Clementi (Hayley Adams), Thomas Jane (Admiral Kiernan Adams-King), Johnny Messmer (Blucher ‘Blue’ Macon), Corey Large (Lincoln), Johann Urb (Shady), Angie Pack (Dr Isabella Ortega), Callan Mulvey (Teek), Ralf Moeller (Vyrl), Van Ayasit (Xu)
Plot
The year 2242. Colony ships are leaving the dying Earth to set up anew on the planet that has been called New Earth. Noah Corel stows away aboard the USS Hercules because he has gotten the admiral’s daughter Hayley Adams pregnant and wants to be with her. After waking from hypersleep, Noah slots in unnoticed as one of the ship’s janitors on the 85 day journey before the Hercules reaches New Earth. However, a parasitic organism has gotten aboard – possibly a genetically engineered lifeform released by rebels who seek to prevent humanity from reaching other planets. The parasite proceeds to inhabit members of the crew and take over the ship as the survivors are forced into a desperate fight to try and stop it.
The last films of Bruce Willis have gained a reputation as being very bad. In 2022 it was made public that Willis was suffering from dementia, in particular from aphasia that left him with difficult with speech and comprehension. His guardians had signed Bruce up for a series of films where he would make $1-2 million per appearance usually for only a few minutes screen time in a supporting role that would be billed as the lead. This period covers some twenty films made between 2020-3. In 2023, it was announced that Bruce was retiring as his mental state had deteriorated too badly to continue and was having difficulty even recognising where he was. Most of the films Willis made during this period are low-budget action films, although there are a handful of genre vehicles among these such as Apex (2021), Cosmic Sin (2021), Corrective Measures (2022) and Assassin (2023). All of these are regarded as fairly bad.
Quite a number of Willis’s latter films were overseen by Canadian actor/producer Corey Large, who also plays roles in each of the films. Large had made 21 films with Willis, going all the way back to 2012, which have included thirteen of those made during Willis’ final period with Apex, Cosmic Sin, Corrective Measures and the Detective Knight films, as well as the earlier Vice (2015). The film’s co-writer Edward Drake also directed Cosmic Sin and six of the other latter day Bruce films and scripted nine of them.
I enjoyed Breach more than the other latter day Bruce Willis films I have watched to date. Once we get aboard the space mission, the characters are portrayed with a certain wry, gritty edge that works well. The film has clearly been shot on minimal sets but does so reasonably effectively. You even have to give it kudos from a science-fictional perspective for the script tossing in discussions of the Fermi Paradox.
The surprise of the film is that Bruce Willis gives a halfway decent performance. The general opinion of these latter-day Bruce Willis films is that he was turning up without much clue what he was doing or even the dialogue he was saying. His performances in the other films that I have seen among those are barely serviceable and at times seem to have been pieced together in ways that the filmmakers are trying to make the best of what they can. Here however, Bruce gives it the same wry, crusty and hard-headed playing he used to in his heyday and his character is the most colourfully alive one in the film.
(l to r) Rachel Nichols, Bruce Willis and Cody Kearsley try to survive a parasitic lifeform
The disappointment of Breach is that after setting up an interesting scenario and managing to get a decent performance from Bruce Willis it proves to just be another copy of Alien (1979). And okay there are no actual aliens present, more a set of Parasites that have been unleashed by rebels trying to stop colonisation of another planet – an explanation that leaves you feeling it needed more plausibility than it is given – but it is still another Alien copy.
The latter half of Breach simply becomes a variant on Alien and probably more so Aliens (1986) with survivors running around trying to shoot up and eliminate the parasite possessed. This runs by the standard playbook of the average Alien copy. It all takes place on limited sets. Nor does director John Suits manage to build much in the way of tension, which is not something I would have said about Suits’ earlier Pandemic (2016).
Breach is not related to and should not be confused with The Breach (2023), an H.P. Lovecraft homage made by Rodrigo Gudiño around the same time.
Breach was the seventh film as a director for John Suits. Suits had previously made the horror film Breathing Room (2008), the non-genre likes of Family of Four (2009) and 2nd Take (2011); The Scribbler (2014), an SF film about multiple personalities; Pandemic (2016), a zombie film shot from First Person Shooter perspective, and the SF film 3022 (2019). Suits has far more credits as a producer with the New Artists Alliance production company, headed by he and his business partner Gabriel Cowan. Their films include the genre likes of Growth (2010), Extracted (2012), Static (2012), Bad Milo! (2013), Cheap Thrills (2013), 400 Days (2014) and Fear, Inc. (2016).
