It's funny watching the elements come together in this complicated scam. On one hand, the set-up isn't quite as complex as it seems, but there's an easy sense of fun in every exchange.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Once upon a time "Breakdown" would have been considered nothing more than a B-Movie but the kind of B-Movie that might have gone on to become a classic. It's a very simple little suspense movie and it's beautifully directed by Jonathan Mostow. It's also something of a road-movie which, like Spielberg's "Duel" generates a good deal of suspense from its use of great open spaces and the interplay between a guy in a car (Kurt Russell) and a guy in a truck (J. T. Walsh). Russell is perfect as the slightly arrogant hero and Walsh is suitably menacing as the guy who may or may not be behind the disappearence of Russell's wife. Cult movie status beckons.

Jonathan Mostow's Breakdown is one hellcat of a thriller, a nitrous injected highway nightmare scenario that doesn't quit until the tanks empty, quite a few people are dead and Kurt Russell has burned off umpteen carbs running about the southwest searching for his missing wife (Kathleen Quinlan). In the tradition of great road pictures like Steven Spielberg's Duel and Robert Harmon's The Hitcher, this one know ms to keep the speedometer revved for maximum effect, the best method for these types of films. Russell and Quinlan are your average American couple, driving from A to B along some forgotten stretch of freeway out there. After a brief stop, she vanished, he panics and so begins his breathless crusade for the truth. The local cops are useless, no one seems to have witnessed her vanish, and he's pretty much on his own, not to mention hunted by some nefarious truck drivers who probably know more than they should. J.T. Walsh, king of businesslike scumbag roles, gives what may be his nastiest here as Red Barr, a long-haul semi driver who knows exactly where Russell's wife has gone, and ain't telling, no sir no how. Similarly, big old M.C. Gainey, another Hollywood thug, is in high evil gear as just one more backroad asshole Russell has to deal with, and the two have a crackling showcase of a high speed standoff, one in the driver's and one in the passenger seat, playing close quarters mortal kombat to see who comes out on top, and who comes out dead. The Fast and The Furious has nothing on these types of films, for it's less about bombarding an audience with a stunt a second, and more about rhythmic pacing, then knowing when to open up and let the ripcord fly. Taut, precise, unrelenting little flick.

This is from the film noir tradition where hapless schmucks find themselves caught in the gears of nightmare, the abstract weave of roads on a map in the credit sequence might as well be the strings of fate the schmuck is tied to and forced to dance.Suitably abstract at first, a happily modern life, exemplified in the SUV with its fancy leather and electronics, that for some inexplicable reason breaks down on the road and the couple get out to be greeted only by a hostile nothingness. In the western man was master of this world, here witless noir pawn. The suggestion is that everything might have been okay had he not stepped on the gas too hard because he panicked, the anxiety causing the breakdown. But this is soon abandoned for ordinary schemes where the fragility of that modern life is exposed by having it so easily exploited as someone reaching under the hood of a car and snapping two wires that held it together. It is still his suburban nightmare of having lost his wife and not having enough money in that Boston bank account to get her back with because he paid for the fancy car but now we have petty conmen looking for just money and everything clear and simple.So this is one of those films where you can see the wonderful ambiguities of noir being supplanted by a simple traction, another is Lethal Weapon. First the thriller and then action mechanics. By the end it's silly and straightforward, the sole reason not to turn it off being that you might want to see people avoid being run over by a truck or hang from a bridge.

The first hour of this is pretty good, then you just have to shut off your brain and enjoy the ride as things get silly. I definitely felt the suspense, frustration and fear of Kurt Russell's character after his car breaks down in the desert and the trucker that gave his wife a ride to a diner later claims not to have ever seen her.A decent mystery, good road trip movie on desolate highways filled with crazy redneck bad guys who seem to have come up with a pretty intricate kidnapping/heist plan for some not so smart guys. Kurt Russell pulls off some decent stunts involving big-rigs and fancy driving especially in the final showdown on the bridge. Reminded me of that other mid 90's movie The Vanishing where the girlfriend disappears from a gas station bathroom. 8/24/14