Breach

3 stars out of 5

I caught most of this movie on TV the other day, and it was not until I was 90% of the way through that I realized that this was based on a true story. Yikes. I would have taken it more seriously had I known.

The story is about Robert Hanssen, the worst security breach the US has had since Aldrich Ames. Hanssen was an FBI guy (though he did some time working with the State Department) who was in the pocket of the Russians. So they send in this young whooper snapper (Ryan Philippe) to be his clerk/secretary and find some dirt on him. Apparently they knew he was rotten, but they bought all their evidence from a Russian tycoon and it was not admissible in court. So they needed the whooper snapper to do some work.

That sounds like a terrible job to me - pretend to work for a guy, but really be trying to find some dirt. Especially when you are as super-paranoid as Hanssen already was, since Hanssen knew he was going to be in big big trouble if his secrets came out. So it is kind of a suspenseful, harrowing kind of movie. Not all that fun for me, but a good story nonetheless.

I probably wouldn't go out of my way to watch this movie, but if it's on, and you are in front of the TV, it's not bad. That's my stirring recommendation for it.

Also, I learned that "Ryan Philippe" is different than "Philip Seymour Hoffman". Ryan Philippe is the guy we all know as Milo Hoffman from Antitrust. Philip Seymour Hoffman is some old guy that always plays bad guys.