Breakdown

This is the kind of workmanlike, sturdy action picture that Tinseltown should be churning out every other week, but in fact manages to deliver only once in a blue moon. A city-slicker couple (Kurt Russell and Kathleen Quinlan) asks a friendly trucker (J.T. Walsh) to help out when their car breaks down in the middle of nowhere; the trucker agrees to drive Quinlan to a nearby pay phone, but she never arrives, and he later claims never to have seen Russell or his wife before. Unlike most recent action movies, Breakdown delivers what it promises: thrills, excitement, suspense, gut-churning kinetic mayhem--and does so without insulting the audience's intelligence. This is about as pure as action gets: no hip one-liners; no distracting sidekick or love interest; no labyrinthine, incomprehensible backstory involving stolen floppy disks or covert government operations or diabolical schemes to undermine the nation's socio-economic infrastructure. What we have here is elemental: hero loses something valuable, hero struggles to regain it. Hero encounters obstacles, hero overcomes obstacles. Simple, direct, clean. And refreshing. Highly recommended. (M. D'Angelo)