BREAKING – Review by Susan Wloszczyna
Filmmaker Abi Damaris Corbin’s Breaking is a military take on 1975’s Dog Day Afternoon. In that film, Al Pacino’s bank robber committed a crime so he could pay for his male lover’s sex-change operation, which back in that era felt rather farcical given that LBTQ community was not exactly embraced back then.
That stick-up job was based on a true story and so is this one. But the mood here is different — overly melodramatic, uneasy, tense and more than somewhat manipulative as it portrays how war vets aren’t given support they need to resume life as a civilian.
On July 7, 2017, Brian Brown -Easley (John Boyega), an ex- Marine Cops lance corporal who served in Iraq and Kuwait, walks into a Wells Fargo bank in Atlanta and passes a note to a teller that says, “I have a bomb.” He wants to get the money that the Veteran Affairs owes him – namely $892 and some cents.
Brian, who we first see living in a tent city on the streets, never got the medical help that he needed and is still traumatized by what he suffered and witnessed during battle. His main priority is his young daughter Kiah, who desperately wants a dog and wants to name it for Frodo’s sidekick buddy Sam from The Lord of the Rings. Meanwhile, his ex-wife who lives in a house that presumably was his own at one time basks in the attention that her ex is getting from TV news.
He allows all but two female tellers to stay behind as the rest of the staff flees. Estel (played with nuance and a wealth of sympathetic emotion by Nicole Beharie) and Rosa (Selenis Leyva).
While Boyega does his best to give off nervy vibes and moments of despair, his performance is upstaged by the late actor Michael Kenneth Williams, whose cop acts as a go-between and a negotiator for Brian outside of the bank. He wrings plenty of drama as he stands up for Brian. Sadly, the actor who starred in the HBO series The Wire, was found dead on Sept. 6, 2021, in his home in Brooklyn. He was 54. Perhaps he might get a posthumous Oscar nomination for his work here just as Chadwick Bosman did for his supporting role in in 2020’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.
