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. **
