Chaplin
Better off silent
The 3rd of the top 4 underrated films from 1998 (and probably another rarely seen) is the brilliant Breakdown...
SYNOPSIS: Jeff Taylor (Kurt Russell) and his wife Amy (Kathleen Quinlan) are traveling cross-country, and in the middle of the Arizona desert, their Jeep breaks down. A friendly trucker, played with gusto by the great character actor JT Walsh, stops to help and offers to drive Amy into town to call for help. After they have gone, Jeff finds the problem and fixes it, and drives into town himself, only to find that the trucker and Amy never showed up into town. What follows is an odyssey of one man as he tries to track down his wife, of whom everyone he meets claims they haven't seen.
When I first saw the film, I was immediately reminded not of The Vanishing, but of the best Hitchcock thrillers. The story is deceptively simple, and since it takes place in the middle of the desert, the atmosphere is oppressive and hopeless.
I am in the minority when I say that Kurt Russell is one of the most underappreciated actors of the last twenty years. His movies are consistently likable (except for maybe Escape from LA!!)
, and he always turns in a great performance. And there is no exception here. Jeff is a man who is angry, but that anger is overshadowed by the desperation of trying to get down to the bottom of this mystery.
The motley crew of villains are a delight--luckily, it isn't the staple villains of the main evil bastard, his second-in-command who is invincible and 30 henchman who are there seemingly to absorb bullets. They consist of 4 men, each of which has their own personality--and each is nasty. You delight in seeing them put into their own dangerous situations.
The film was written and directed by Jonathan Mostow, who would go on to make U-571 and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. Not a bad resume.
SYNOPSIS: Jeff Taylor (Kurt Russell) and his wife Amy (Kathleen Quinlan) are traveling cross-country, and in the middle of the Arizona desert, their Jeep breaks down. A friendly trucker, played with gusto by the great character actor JT Walsh, stops to help and offers to drive Amy into town to call for help. After they have gone, Jeff finds the problem and fixes it, and drives into town himself, only to find that the trucker and Amy never showed up into town. What follows is an odyssey of one man as he tries to track down his wife, of whom everyone he meets claims they haven't seen.
When I first saw the film, I was immediately reminded not of The Vanishing, but of the best Hitchcock thrillers. The story is deceptively simple, and since it takes place in the middle of the desert, the atmosphere is oppressive and hopeless.
I am in the minority when I say that Kurt Russell is one of the most underappreciated actors of the last twenty years. His movies are consistently likable (except for maybe Escape from LA!!)
, and he always turns in a great performance. And there is no exception here. Jeff is a man who is angry, but that anger is overshadowed by the desperation of trying to get down to the bottom of this mystery.The motley crew of villains are a delight--luckily, it isn't the staple villains of the main evil bastard, his second-in-command who is invincible and 30 henchman who are there seemingly to absorb bullets. They consist of 4 men, each of which has their own personality--and each is nasty. You delight in seeing them put into their own dangerous situations.
The film was written and directed by Jonathan Mostow, who would go on to make U-571 and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. Not a bad resume.
