BREACH (2007)

Over before it starts, but still intriguing, co-writer/director Billy Ray looks back in discomfort at how a junior agent-in-training (Ryan Phillippe) became the aide (and the end) of F.B.I. turncoat Robert Hanssen (Chris Cooper).  Adjudged the most destructive insider ever to spy against the agency (paid for decades to feed info & contacts to the USSR), we don’t see much of this action, instead it’s all undercover investigation of Hanssen after he’s lured to the home office with the promise of overseeing a computer upgrade for the entire F.B.I.  A very strange guy even without being a traitor, but we come into the story so late, the film can’t develop what ought to be its raison d’être: how the heck did this creepathon of a guy (perverted sexual tastes; antisocial, off-putting religious hypocrite, inflexible solo-flyer) didn't raise alarms given his position of power and authority.  (And what’s a 60-something yr-old guy doing running IT anyway?  That’s a young man’s game even at an old school outfit like the FBI.)  Instead, the script is like an elongated Mission Impossible episode for choirboyish Phillippe buddying up to this prickly personality as he seeks something ethically damning on him or witnesses a misstep in foreign info exchange for his undercover superiors.  Stakes are sky high, but never feel so.  Not even the added stress this puts on his marriage.  The obvious idea that the wife is left out of the loop for her own protection never mentioned.  We’re left with four or five story beats over the whole film, with Phillippe having to think fast on his feet and lie his way out of some slipup.  Execution reasonably well-cooked but flavorless, tension mild at best.  Mostly worth a look to see quiet/assured/sympathetic Chris Cooper going all John Malkovich on us.  (Or is it now Michael Shannon?)  No one else here nearly as interesting or interestingly cast.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  What about our major spy orgs pulls in such amazingly destructive insiders?  Over at the C.I.A., founding fellow James Jesus Angleton did so much damage misreading the tea leaves he might as well have been a Commie spy.  He’s fictionalized in a manner nearly as inept as he proved to be in Robert De Niro’s THE GOOD SHEPHERD/’06.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/12/good-shepherd-2006.html