Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Breach’ on Amazon Prime, A Hunk Of Bruce Willis-Helmed VOD Space Junk

The screenwriter of Breach (Amazon Prime) also wrote a science fiction outing called Cosmic Sin that is also attached to Bruce Willis. So maybe the once-bankable Hollywood star has pivoted his video-on-demand appearances from cantankerous ex-special ops guy/cantankerous rich guy/cantankerous veteran cop guy to cantankerous space traveler of the future. Where will the wilds of barren VOD plotting take ex-John McClane next? The answer is in the stars.

BREACH: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: It’s 2242, and in a world overrun by plague and famine, the last space shuttle out of Dodge is about to turn and burn for “New Earth.” While the precious few with tickets climb aboard, desperate stragglers and would-be stowaways clamor for a ride. For Noah (Cody Kearsley), the situation is different. His girlfriend, who is also carrying their unborn child, is the daughter of the shuttle’s commanding officer, Admiral Kiernan Adams (Thomas Jane). Noah is put on the spacecraft’s sanitation crew while his girlfriend, the admiral, and presumably hundreds of others are put into cryo sleep for the long journey through space. That leaves a skeleton crew of medics, engineers, and — for some reason — multiple janitors to keep the shuttle running, a group that includes grizzled, boozy senior cleaner Clay (Bruce Willis) and plucky medical officer Chandler (Rachel Nichols). Keeping watch over all of them isn’t Admiral Adams but his subordinate, Commander Stanley (Timothy V. Murphy), as well as a glowering henchman named Teek (Callan Mulvey).

With its handful of game pieces on the board, Breach then introduces the buggy space parasite that quickly takes down a portion of the crew, and downshifts into a clunky hybrid of Aliens, John Carpenter’s The Thing, and even Dawn of the Dead. As more and more crewmembers are consumed by the malevolent alien force, and the shuttle continues to hurtle toward its New Earth destination, the heroic space maids fashion powerful weapons from their cleaning supplies and concoct a last-ditch gambit to save the cryo sleepers and themselves before it’s too late. Unfortunately, in space, no one can hear you clean.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Its hodgepodge of allusions to the other, better, science fiction films mentioned above immediately make Breach feel like an also-ran. But it also feels like a slog through thick mud, having to endure its lazy dialogue, bolted-on CGI, and aimless references to the thorny politics of 23rd century Earth.

Performance Worth Watching: Bruce Willis actually shows up this time around, which is more than can be said of his usual 15 minutes-ish of screen time in these VOD trainwrecks he keeps making. As Clay, outer space’s most drunk sanitation engineer, Willis’s crabby scowl at least finds a few spots to land, even if the entire enterprise feels hollow from the start.

Memorable Dialogue: With his irascible wit and penchant for playing the pugnacious scold, Willis spent decades as a surefire box office draw. But with VOD flotsam like Breach trading on the relevance of that fading star, Willis’s glum mug staring out from a streaming site menu is why they wrote him the check, which leaves Willis the actor to deliver dull pantomimes of his once durable onscreen presence. “I’m good at falling up,” his character grumbles in Breach, and it seems like that’s all Willis is required to do, too.

Sex and Skin: Nothing to speak of.

Our Take: There is a hallway in outer space. It is lined with industrial girders, and its lighting system shifts from sickly green to glowing red or chilly blue, depending on who or what wanders down its length. At one end of the hall is a quantum reactor, though it looks more like a light fixture at an after-hours disco jury-rigged to the keypad from a Speak & Spell. And at the other end is a conventional men’s room complete with urinals and stalls. Hundreds of years from now, after society has reached its breaking point, after the last hulking shuttle has departed for “New Earth,” is this all intrepid future generations of humans will have to look forward to? Some guy mopping out the interstellar equivalent of a truck stop bathroom? If that quantum reactor at least powers the centrifugal force at work in the toilet bowl, then flushing waste might be something to look forward to. It would certainly be a better experience than actually watching Breach.

Once its cargo of human souls are conveniently bedded down in their cryo tubes — including Thomas Jane as the ship’s admiral — Breach largely narrows the geography of its spacecraft to the aforementioned hallway, a dour employee canteen, and a security office with a lot of store-bought LCD screens. One is left to wonder why the environs of 23rd century interstellar travel resemble the common areas of a 20th century light industrial manufacturing facility. (And a poorly lit one, at that.) Jane, who receives the honorific of “and” in the opening credits for his brief work here, appears in a leather jacket-and-aviators combo that channels British Steel-era Judas Priest, then promptly disappears, leaving the floor open for Timothy V. Murphy, well-known for TV villain turns on Sons of Anarchy, Criminal Minds, and The Man in the High Castle, to leer at everyone and bark orders in a mile-wide southern accent. (Willis’s character calls Murphy’s no-nonsense company man a “space Nazi”; Murphy played an actual Nazi in High Castle.)

What does all of this mean for Breach? Well, the first guy who explodes due to his consumption of an alien worm does get to spew the phrase “quantum-release time dilation” before that happens, and frequent Bruce Willis adjunct Johnny Messner at least has some fun grimacing through his empty-headed line reads before the intergalactic nematode gets him, too. As for Jane, we’ll never know if his character really was channeling the New Wave of British Heavy Metal and General Douglas MacArthur all at the same time. Willis, meanwhile, plays a drunk, so maybe that explains his mush-mouthed delivery, but probably not. As Breach bounces between its hamfisted Aliens references and turns toward outer space horror, it never finds a place of its own to land. What’s left feels banal, rote, and empty of enjoyment, even for most of its cast members.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Breach is an uninspired rehash of lasting sci-fi horror ingredients that adds no flavor of its own.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges

Watch Breach on Amazon Prime