John Boyega Is Almost Strong Enough to Carry Breaking

S ay this for Abi Damaris Corbin’s Breaking: Its release is well timed. Most obviously: As the nation laments/rejoices over President Biden’s announced intention to forgive massive quantities of student debt (or shift it to taxpayers, depending on your point of view), here we have a story about a struggling soul who makes the desperate decision to take hostages inside a bank — because of a snafu related to student debt.

Slightly less obviously: Many American cities are grappling with crisis-level homelessness — a level that involves at least 20 percent veterans and 33 percent mentally ill people, according to some estimates — and our protagonist here is a homeless Marine veteran who has “episodes” and believes that his brother is part of a cult that put a price on his head and tried to kidnap him on multiple occasions. And while debate continues to rage over questions of race and law enforcement, it’s hard not to wince when a black man asks a woman about another bank holdup she’s witnessed, learns that the perpetrator was arrested but not killed, and immediately concludes, “He must have been white.” There is also the plight of the American veteran who attempts to make good on the debt owed him by his country — but that’s more of an enduring ill. Still: a timely movie.

Say this for Breaking as well: It stars John Boyega as Brian Brown-Easley, a real-life veteran upon whose life the story is based. If I were Boyega, I’m not sure how I’d feel about being compared to a young Denzel Washington. I imagine every actor would like his performance to be taken on its own terms, instead of in reference to another, and I can see how the comparison might be especially frustrating once race comes into play. You’ve got only a handful of black leading men out there, and when a new one comes along, the best you can do is fit him in another one’s slot?

So I’ll start by saying that I didn’t think of Denzel when I saw Boyega in the Star Wars films, nor in 2018’s Pacific Rim: Uprising, nor in 2017’s Detroit. (He was the best, realest thing about Detroit, and he helped make the knockoff Pacific Rim sequel more fun than it had any right to be. We don’t need to talk about Star Wars.) He is very much his own actor. But in Breaking? In Breaking, he reminded me of Denzel again and again: in the cadences of speech, especially during periods of high emotion, be it sorrow, fear, frustration, love, or even religious piety; in the careful but genuine civility that occasionally yields to impassioned outbursts, outbursts that hint at the fury restrained by that civility; even in the expressions — a certain stubborn set of the jaw, a sudden hardening around the eyes. The echoes bordered on distracting, but still, the force of Boyega’s performance did more than anything to carry the film.

And alas, it did need carrying. Director Corbin unspools many threads here. For starters, we have Brown-Easley’s desire to get his money from the VA (and only from the VA), his desire to show the world the extreme to which the VA’s indifference and incompetence have driven him, his desire to make things right with his ex-wife and daughter, and finally, his desire to make things as painless as possible for his two hostages — two female employees at a Wells Fargo in Marietta, Ga. Then we have the sustained effort of one of those employees to mitigate and even escape her situation, an effort that should be aided by the fact that she’s in constant cellphone contact with people on the outside. (Every now and then, we hear a tense exchange, but then . . . what?) And there are a lot of people on the outside, working toward a common goal but not necessarily together: FBI, SWAT, police, snipers, reporters, and oh yes, negotiator Eli Bernard, played by the late Michael K. Williams. (He’s largely wasted here, taking much too long to appear on the scene, and not doing nearly enough once he does.)

But after the unspooling, there is the matter of weaving those threads, preferably in such a way that lets events build on one another, that steadily raises stakes and elevates tension, or at the very least keeps things moving forward. Corbin’s storytelling rises and falls, tenses and relaxes, visits and revisits. And there are some threads to which she barely attends at all. At one point, our snipers are forced to pack up and change their position after a SWAT truck rolls into their line of sight. What with all the breaking down of guns and hauling of bags and cutting of brush, it feels significant. It isn’t.

Maybe that’s life. Maybe the inclusion of details like this is meant to help lend a documentary feel to a story based on real events. But it doesn’t make for a gripping hostage drama. It could be that this is the point — that what we’re supposed to care about here is the man and not the outcome, the situation and not the story. (I’d argue that it ought to be possible to do right by both.) But even that doesn’t excuse the baffling bits where the narrative just fades into the background, such as a long phone conversation between Boyega and Williams that has him slumped against the wall in an enclosed space, his hostages totally out of his sight and just steps from the doors to freedom. It’s only at the end that Corbin’s focus sharpens and the story is allowed to move us.

At one point, our troubled veteran brandishes a bomb detonator and cries out in enraged anguish, “What do I need to do to get the attention that I need right now?” Almost immediately afterward, he apologizes to his hostages; he’s a decent guy and doesn’t want to frighten them. That’s the power of Breaking: a good man doing something he knows is dangerous but that he doesn’t really think is wrong, trying to stay on the side of the angels even as he faces the Reaper. (Again and again, he assures people that he knows he’s a dead man.) But it’s a force that’s blunted by a discursive style that is almost but not quite overcome by its lead.