Breakdown

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning

Alfie Jennings (Craig Fairbrass) is a cold, ruthless contract killer, who has suddenly developed a crisis with his conscience, haunted by nightmarish visions of those he has killed over the years. It all comes to a head one night when he is unable to a finish a job, and embarrasses headman Chapman (James Cosmo), his employer and family friend. With his fifteen year old daughter to look after, and loving wife in tow, Alfie realises it's time to quit the life...but Chapman has other ideas.

Breakdown enjoyed the most limited of cinema releases, before rapidly arriving on DVD. If this kind of British film were in the mainstream, it would paint a very grim picture of the current state of our green and pleasant land. While many may think it has a point, the brutal, unflinching violence and cold, dispassionate onslaughts this film delivers at times, really make your skin crawl and test your endurance limit, making you question when as a decent person you should turn away.

This is fairly standard looking in presentation, and appears to want to burst right out of it's direct to DVD confines, offering that little bit more meat on the bones than the usual such film, cramming in subplots involving family dramas and soforth, and even an element of horror at the beginning that might have stretched the budget a bit. Fairbrass has an undeniably hard, no nonsense presence and delivery, and is very effective in the lead role, whilst Cosmo, by turns, is a quietly understated and menacing villain.

Ultimately, though, it isn't pieced together well enough to work as a whole, and the sheer gratuity and nastiness of it really weighs it down. **

I watch the new British films emerging from a generation of filmmakers trained in the language of Hollywood realism and soaps and TV detectives/villains and wonder if anyone who gets involves in making cinema like this realises what a waste it all is..same terrible copies of every other kind of cliché/stereotype/scene structure/shot style/music soundtrack that has been a massive bore time and again. Dreadful script, appalling characterisation,violence,lots of blood,gore,and for what ? For no one to see it in a cinema,or anywhere else with luck, all for the sake of making "a film".Those who made this should be ashamed .....when there are so many ordinary people's lives in Britain totally ignored by mainstream media, hidden behind crap like this so called film.

One of Craig's better movies & has such screen presence. Brilliant actor and love him in portraying gangster sort of character's.

Just when you think they don't make any good indie British films anymore, unless its gangster Essex boys, football thugs and drugs, along comes something right out of left field that literally stopped me in my tracks, I actually paused the film and SCREAMED!! You have to COME watch this, it's really good! and we did.

BREAKDOWN is not the norm by any stretch, OK its low budget, but there is something extremely engaging about it, its cinematic, gripping, beautifully acted in my view and totally convincing..I did look away a few times though especially in the torture scene but on the whole a seriously good film, riveting storyline, believable characters and the taxidermist twist I just loved. You just have to keep the faith and keep watching British films because every now and then something rather special comes along and BREAKDOWN is just that.

Completed to write this! Peace and Love.

You know what you're gonna get with Fairbrass. You're not gonna get Oscar performances but compared to some of his films, this was better.

I enjoyed it, although I could see where it was heading.

Overall, one of his better films.