Abi Damaris Corbin’s terse and powerful Breaking falls snugly into the genre of film centered around hostage negotiations, but it extends past familiarity with the aim of satisfying more than our thirst for thrills. Based closely on a real incident from 2017, the film tells the story of Brian Brown-Easley (John Boyega), a Marine veteran suffering from PTSD who walked into a Wells Fargo bank in an Atlanta suburb and said he would detonate a bomb unless his demand was met. That demand would seem almost comically small in a fictional version of this story: $892 in disability payments that the Department of Veterans Affairs withheld from Easley, which he needed in order to pay off student debt. This is a man looking not to get rich or take revenge, but to get a little shred of his dignity back.
Breaking takes its time before busting out the amplified drama of a police and hostage-taker standoff, giving Brian time to come across as a person rather than an archetype. Rendered by Boyega with a pensive, gentle grace, Brian is first seen talking on the phone to his daughter, Kiah (London Covington), and drifting disconsolately through scrubby and little-noticed corners of Atlanta. He registers more wistful sadness than bottled-up rage.
As a result, when Brian first walks into the bank and announces that he has a bomb, our unease derives more from concern that he won’t make it out alive than that he’ll try to kill anyone. He’s deferential and polite to the bank employees that he keeps as hostages—Estel (Nicole Beharie) and Rosa (Selenis Leyva)—rather than threatening, reserving his rage for the V.A. and the inability of the police steadily massing outside to do anything to help him.
Corbin’s quiet and unobtrusive style helps her film build tension in the standoff primarily from character instead of incident. She takes her time before cutting to the police massing outside the bank. Before then, she tracks the interplay between the people inside the bank, with Rosa’s panicky anxiousness contrasted to Estel’s cool competence as both try to determine whether Brian, even with all his apologies and “yes, ma’am”-ing, is dangerous or not. The three performers work together superbly in these scenes, and Beharie’s poise and precision is deeply resonant. Boyega impressively communicates Brian’s decency even when the character spirals from reality-based rage at dehumanizing bureaucracy to the paranoid delusions that he rants at Lisa (Connie Britton), the TV news producer he calls from the bank to gain attention.
Another standout is Michael Kenneth Williams, appearing here in one of his last roles as Eli Bernard, the hostage negotiator. The way that Eli is presented is standard for the genre, standing apart from the police as a smarter-than-average, free-thinking skeptic with a preference for resolving things without guns. But Williams brings his own memorable texturing to the character, establishing a resonant connection with Brian right away, partially due to a shared Marine background but also Eli’s heartfelt outreach and keenly apparent desire for getting Brian and the hostages out alive before SWAT storms in.
Though they don’t overplay the extent of Estel and Rosa’s sympathy for Brian’s plight (nice guy or not, they’re still rightly terrified), Corbin and co-writer Kwame Kwei-Armah clearly aim to make Breaking about more than the resolution of the hostage crisis. The V.A. is portrayed as a dead-end bureaucracy more concerned about paying off a for-profit college than helping an Iraq War veteran who’s just a few dollars away from homelessness and having no money to eat.
As for the film’s depiction of law enforcement, the swarming phalanxes of militarized police—many of whom appear to be veterans who, like Eli and unlike Brian, found a way to reorient to civilian life—looks more like they’re mustering for an invasion than trying to save anybody’s life. Similarly, while the time on Brian’s poorly-thought-out plan runs out, some of what he says seems disconnected from reality—less real than movie-worthy. But others, such as his stated belief that being Black means that he has little chance of getting out of his situation alive, appear fully borne out by the crushing institutional powers arrayed against him.
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