Breach (2022)

Maintaining an acting career is tough. Only a handful of actors become big enough draws that their starring roles last for decades. Many burn bright for a small amount of time then fade from the cultural conscience. Maybe they took smaller roles. Maybe they decided to step away from acting. Or maybe they weren’t the box office draw they once were, and were relegated to starring in projects that were off the beaten path. Headlining mainstream, theatrical movies as the star for more than a few years is extremely difficult for an actor to do.

In recent years, there have been other outlets for actors to pursue as they try to keep working. The quality of television has steadily been on the rise with cable networks like HBO, AMC, and FX pushing for shows with bigger budgets and better story focus. Streaming services have produced quality output in terms of movies and series to stand out among the various other outlets. Even direct-to-video movies have seen a jump from the low-quality cash-ins or lower budget flicks with no backing. Those kinds of movies still exist, but they typically make for better entertainment now than they did back in the day. The advancements in technology and the slow decline of theatrical variety led to some better quality fare going elsewhere.

As those other outlets became better respected, actors who didn’t have the same box office cache they used to turned to these other places to continue their careers. There have been actors who embraced roles in these kinds of projects. Nicolas Cage and Eric Roberts are regulars in the non-theatrical market. They’ve racked up a bunch of credits, particularly over the past few years, that haven’t been in theatrical fare. Sure, occasionally they pop up on the big screen. Most of the time, though, their careers are relegated elsewhere.

Another actor who jumped off the big screen and took roles through these other avenues was Bruce Willis. Yes, I should note that the jump was likely because of his health issues. He couldn’t take on the bigger, meatier roles because he had aphasia, which made it difficult to communicate. Imagine learning and memorizing a bunch of dialogue with a disease that makes language difficult. Imagine taking cues from a director or explaining character motivation with that same issue. The direct-to-video stuff he took on was much less extensive when it came to the amount of work he did.

A good example was this week’s movie, Breach. Bruce Willis was in it, and he was the big name that they used to sell it to audiences, but he wasn’t the main character. Sometime in the future, a plague overtook Earth. The few healthy people who were left boarded a spaceship headed for “New Earth,” a planet being terraformed to sustain human life. Leading the ship was military man Admiral Adams (Thomas Jane), who also took his pregnant daughter Hayley (Kassandra Clement). Hayley’s boyfriend, Noah (Cody Kearsley) snuck on board and posed as a janitor so he could join the voyage and be with his girlfriend and their unborn child. Most people on the ship were placed in a cryosleep, while a select few janitors, engineers, doctors, and military personnel remained awake to maintain the ship during its voyage. Along the way, Noah and his new supervisor, Clay (Bruce Willis), discovered an alien parasite bent on ending humanity by killing everyone on board. They needed to stop it.

As you can see, Bruce Willis was the top secondary character in Breach. Most of the movie was spent with Noah as he saw things on the ship grow increasingly strange. Until about the halfway point, that is, when everyone found out about the alien parasite and spent the rest of the movie trying to stop it. Noah was the rookie janitor, working his first job during the trip. Clay was his superior, the grizzled janitorial veteran who only showed up in the first half when he had to bark orders to Noah. Otherwise, he was practically non-existent. His role was beefed up in the second half when he and Noah led the charge on stopping the alien.

This was clearly a step down for Bruce Willis. I wouldn’t say it was a step down in quality. Most people would, but I wouldn’t. I quite enjoyed Breach. I thought it was a decent action horror movie. It was a step down from Bruce Willis’s normal roles. He was typically the hero of the movie. He was the main character of most of his movies. Yet, in Breach, he was the secondary hero. He wasn’t the main character. This was the level of role he typically took when he wasn’t starring in action movies. In a movie like Moonrise Kingdom, yeah, sure, he’d take a smaller supporting role. But action was his domain. He was John McClane. It was really his shift to direct-to-video in 2015 that he eased off on being the lead actor.

Through many of his direct-to-video roles, Bruce Willis took on the role of mentor, father figure, villain, family friend, or detective in the b-story. He was no longer the action star. This allowed him, with his aphasia, to have fewer lines in any given production. He didn’t need to always be the focus of the story, so there was less work for him to do. Instead of being in almost every scene, like John McClane in most of the Die Hard movies, he could come in and out of the movie to support the main character’s journey. Sometimes, he didn’t even show up until well into the runtime. In Breach, it took ten or fifteen minutes for Bruce Willis to show up, when he would typically show up as soon as any of his theatrical movies began.

The other thing that shifting his career to direct-to-video did was twofold. First, it allowed Bruce Willis to make a few more movies before he was forced to retire earlier this year. More movies released meant more money. If he was nearing retirement, he would need the extra money to support himself going forward. Secondly, it could get more of these movies made. It is hard enough for the producer of a direct-to-video movie to find financing and get things off the ground. Having the addition of a well-known actor could push a movie up to the financial backing it needs to fully achieve the director’s vision. Yes, Breach featured people like Cody Kearsley and Thomas Jane, but Bruce Willis was a bigger name than either of them. Even if Tom Jane played The Punisher at one point. Bruce Willis was the face that could be biggest slapped on DVD and VOD art.

To sum all of that up, Bruce Willis was diagnosed with aphasia. I don’t know when, but it seems clear that his grasp on language had been fading for a few years. He shifted his career from starring in theatrical movies to, mostly, playing supporting roles in a bunch of direct-to-video movies. It was a necessity due to his newfound disability being in the way of performing as well as he once did. Many of the movies were poorly received, with his performances being a sticking point. We didn’t know about his aphasia five years ago. We found out when he retired earlier this year.

I would say that, based on Breach, he was still putting in good performances now and again. His performance as Clay kind of fit the character perfectly. He was a disconnected former military man going through the motions as an aged janitorial supervisor. It was very much in line with how people saw him as an actor. He was disconnected from his craft, in many instances, and simply going through the motions. There were moments where the bravado of the Bruce Willis of the 90s came through. A little bit of that Hudson Hawk cockiness. And that’s where I think he may have done the best he could. Maybe I wouldn’t have thought this two years ago, or even two months ago. Or maybe I would. I was never as negative on Bruce Willis as other people got over the past decade.

As for everything else in Breach, it was a derivative story that played out in an entertaining way. I had a blast watching it. Sure, it took me a while to figure out I knew Cody Kearsley because he played Moose in Riverdale. Yeah, there was a guy who, from certain angles, looked just like Matthew McConaughey. And, of course, the story was very much just The Thing mixed with zombies on a spaceship. I get that it might not be everybody’s cup of tea. But I had a good time. That’s all that matters to me at this point. Would I watch it again? Hell yeah.

Bruce Willis was one of many actors who have found projects outside of the typical theatrical movies. Not all of them went the direct-to-video route. Adam Sandler took his talents to Netflix and has been pumping out movies for the streaming service for seven years now. Sure, he had some theatrical movies like the Hotel Transylvania movies and Uncut Gems mixed in there. For the most part, however, he remained a Netflix guy. Kevin Bacon turned to television with roles in The Following, I Love Dick, City on a Hill, and the upcoming horror series They/Them. Eric Roberts agreed to work on almost anything he was asked to work on, putting him in all kinds of things. Each was a big theatrical star at one point who found green pastures in other avenues as well.

Being a superstar actor is a tough thing in the modern day. Well, it is if you only think of stardom in terms of theatrical output and box office draw. The thing is, that’s not the only way to calculate how big a star an actor is. With direct-to-video flicks finding better financing and quality, television becoming much more respected, and streaming services throwing their hats into the ring, major stardom can come from any direction. An actor could become a huge hit thanks to a television show or a streaming movie. They could put out some respectable direct-to-video stuff between two theatrical movies. There are many options for where an actor’s career could go, and every option could help build or keep their stardom. All mediums are getting better and it’s only a matter of time before they’re seen for what they truly are: extensions of the same art form.

Now let’s get to some notes:

• I mentioned Hudson Hawk (week 232) earlier in the post.
• Ralf Moeller made his fourth Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance in Breach. His other appearances were Batman & Robin (week 138), Far Cry (week 364), and The Scorpion King (week 380).
• Rachel Nichols was in Breach. She was also in AlexCross (week 12).
• Johnny Messner has appeared in both Breach and Anacondas: Hunt for the Blood Orchid (week 80).
• I’ve already mentioned Hudson Hawk (week 232), which featured Bruce Willis long before he was in Breach.
• Johann Urb returned from The Hottie and the Nottie (week 395) for Breach.
• Finally, Breach wasn’t Thomas Jane’s first Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance. That honour went to Money Plane (week 437).
• Have you seen Breach? What did you think of it? Good or bad? How do you feel about Bruce Willis’s late career DTV work? Let me know your thoughts on Twitter or in the comments.
• Feel free to drop some suggestions of movies I should check out, too. I’m always open to movies I might not otherwise know. Twitter is a good place to find me. Or just drop the movie in the comments.
• Check out Sunday “Bad” Movies on Instagram for trailers and stuff. Mostly trailers.
• And that brings this post to a close. The only thing left to do is to quickly preview next week’s movie. It’s a fun one. Imagine the movie Jaws. Now remove the shark. Toss a lawnmower in its place. Now relocate the movie from a beach town to a golf course. That’s what Blades is, and that’s what I’ll be watching for next week’s post. Join me, will you?

Tremors 4: The Legend Begins (2004) and How It Works As a Prequel

Making a prequel can be a tough task for a filmmaker. It might even be tougher than writing a sequel. With a sequel, the story can go somewhere new. It can continue what has already been told. There’s a blank canvas ahead, with only a writer’s imagination as the limit. That’s not the case with a prequel. The story can’t go anywhere it wants. Everything must lead to a certain destination. If not at the end of the prequel, then within the future of the prequel. It must be able to line up with the movies that chronologically follow.

Keeping in line with that continuity is easily the most difficult part of making a prequel film. That’s not to say it is the only difficult part of prequelizing. There are a multitude of things that could help or hamper the success of a prequel. Casting, backstory, and even references could lead to audiences groaning as much as it could lead to cheers. Cheers or jeers. A good prequel will slide right into the canon without feeling like fan-service, while a bad prequel could ruin a fan’s day.

I say all this, having just watched Tremors 4: The Legend Begins, an origin story sort of movie for the Tremors franchise. The action was taken back to 1889. Hiram Gummer (Michael Gross), ancestor of franchise protagonist Burt, arrived in the town of Rejection, Nevada to investigate why people were dying in a silver mine he owned. He quickly discovered killer worms infesting the area. It was up to Hiram and the people of Rejection to get rid of the pesky worms so the mine and town could flourish. Well, as much as a small desert town could flourish, that is.

Tremors 4: The Legend Begins was a prequel to the entire franchise. It took place before the three movies and short-lived television series that preceded it. As a prequel, it fell into many of the trappings that a prequel might fall into. It had to tell a story that could take place before the rest of the franchise, without breaking continuity. It referenced some of the events and stuff that would happen in the other movies. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. Let’s get into those elements.

Hiram Gummer was an ancestor of Burt Gummer, the gun-nut who was a part of every other entry in the franchise, both before and after the prequel. He was a completely different character, however. He was mild-mannered, had never fired a gun, and wasn’t even from the area of Rejection (I’ll get to Rejection in a bit). The crux of the movie was spent getting Hiram to the point where the audience would believe that his grandson or great grandson could be Burt Gummer. It was a strange origin story, in that sense. It got even stranger when looking at what Hiram was up against.

The first Tremors movie was all about the people of Perfection discovering giant, carnivorous worms beneath them. They had to find a way to kill the worms while also not making enough sound or vibrations to attract the worms’ attention. How was it that the people in modern day Perfection didn’t know about the worms that tormented 1889 Rejection? Their ancestors were there. Their ancestors experienced the graboids before. This was where the problem with prequels reared its ugly head.

You see, a prequel takes place before the initial story. In this case, the initial story was a town dealing with a new infestation. They were being killed by giant worms. Surely, this was the first time, or they would have heard about previous attacks. It would be like making a Die Hard prequel, when the entire point of the first film was that John McClane was an average cop thrust into a new situation he had never experienced before. How would you make a story set before the first film when the backstory given in the first film was that this sort of thing had never happened before?

In the case of Tremors 4: The Legend Begins, they tossed a bit of dialogue in at the end of the movie to explain it away. After killing all three graboids that were attacking them, the people of Rejection were able to reopen the silver mine nearby. Hiram told them that they shouldn’t mention the monsters to anyone. If they did, nobody would want to come to the area and work in the mine. They were going to sweep it all under the rug. They were going to perform a cover-up. And it worked, too. Nobody in present day Perfection had heard of the graboids before the attacks in the first flick. Hiram and his community kept their word and told nobody. Not even their families.

Back to Hiram for a minute, he was still the main arc of Tremors 4: The Legend Begins. As much as the movie was about a community coming together to take down graboids, it was about Hiram becoming the Gummer that we all knew through Burt. He began the movie as a rich, east coast guy who cared more about feeling pampered than actually getting his hands dirty and doing work. Most of the arc involved him becoming a gunslinger, of sorts, and being happy while killing graboids. This could very much be seen in the final moments when the local innkeeper gave him a gatling gun for shooting practice. He loved it.

However, in true prequel fashion, there were other things that happened with Hiram that were clear references to Burt. When I say, “true prequel fashion,” I mean that a lot of prequels feel the need to shoehorn things from earlier movies into the prequel to pay off backstory that wasn’t necessarily needed. Hiram, at one point, referenced staying in town and building a home on a hill for better perspective, and having a basement in the home. This was a clear reference to the gun bunker Burt had in Tremors.

Another example of this kind of shoe-horning of references was the movie Solo. You know, the Star Wars one. It was a prequel to the original trilogy of Star Wars films that was an origin story of how Han Solo got into the smuggling business. The movie went a little overboard with Han Solo’s origins, though. It tried to do a little too much with one movie. He met Chewbacca. Cool. He won the Millennium Falcon from Lando through gambling. Sure. He did the Kessel Run. Okay, maybe that was a little much. That could have been held off for a sequel. He met Jabba. He got his last name Solo. If I’m remembering correctly, even R2-D2 and C-3PO made appearances. There was no need for all that stuff to make it into the movie, but it did. Because the filmmakers decided there needed to be a whole bunch of references.

The final piece of the prequel puzzle for Tremors 4: The Legend Begins was the town, itself. Rejection became Perfection, if you couldn’t already tell. That played into the Hiram arc. When he first got to the town, he rejected it. Hence the name. There was an inn, a shop, a water tower, and… One other building owned by an Indigenous man. That was kind of it, really. None of the buildings had actual walls. They had a wooden front, and then canvas everywhere else. By the end, after the big battle with the graboids, Hiram liked the town. It was perfect. He was going to live there. They changed the name to Perfection to suit Hiram’s change of mind. Sure, the town didn’t really grow after that. The town in the first Tremors movie was still pretty small. But it felt more lived-in. More permanent.

This sort of thing happens in a lot of prequels. There will be a place or thing that becomes the recognizable place or thing over the course of the runtime. Death Race 2 was a good example of this. It showed the origins of the Death Race, but it had to evolve into the Death Race after starting as a gladiatorial fight sort of thing. The fight was something similar, only with hand-to-hand combat instead of cars. It evolved into the race, much like Rejection evolved into Perfection.

Tremors 4: The Legend Begins wasn’t the worst prequel ever made. It didn’t ruin the continuity in any way, thanks to the dialogue about not telling future generations what they went through. It enlightened audiences about how the town came to get its name, Perfection. And it gave some backstory to the Gummer family. The issue was that it was completely unnecessary. Nobody asked for an origin story for the town. Nobody demanded a wild west version of Tremors. Okay, maybe someone out there did. I don’t know. But they were definitely a very, very small minority. Considering Tremors made it out to be the first time the town experienced graboids, there was no reason to tell a graboid story in the past.

Prequels typically show events that lead up to the events of the original film. The original film might show a character’s story, but that character is a part of something much larger. The Purge showed how the Sandins fought off intruders on Purge Night, while The First Purge showed the origin of Purge Night. Star Wars featured Han Solo, an established smuggler, helping the resistance. Solo showed how Han Solo got into smuggling. Death Race featured the titular Death Race, while Death Race 2 and Death Race: Inferno showed how the Death Race came to be and what happened with the original Frankenstein.

Tremors 4: The Legend Begins failed to shed a new light on anything. It simply took the idea of graboids going after the town and took that into an 1889 setting. It didn’t shed new light on any of the characters. It didn’t shed new light on the graboids. At most, it established the town as Perfection and brought the Gummers into the community. And, even then, Perfection existed before the Gummers, as Rejection. So, really, it didn’t even establish the town, only the name. There were no new layers to things, though. No curtains were pulled back. It was just a new adventure in old times.

There are many things that could make or break a prequel. It must be beholden to what came before it. It must slide into continuity without contradicting established elements of the universe. But it can’t be too referential, or it will take people out of the story. If they are focused on cameos and name drops, they might not be as invested in the emotional arc the characters go through. There should also be a reason for the prequel. It should fill in some backstory, whether to a specific character or to the world that was built. If it feels too disconnected, or if the events barely matter when brought into the rest of the franchise, the audience could feel cheated. A prequel should also try to do something new, or it’ll end up feeling like a repeat of what came before. That’s a sequel issue, too.

Sometimes, a prequel can be a fantastic thing. It can slide into a series as something that happened earlier, bringing new light to the places and characters that the audience fell in love with. With the right story and the right filmmaker, a prequel could end up being one of the best installments of a franchise. That didn’t happen this time around. It has happened before, though. And when it does, it is magical. As movies should be.

That was a cheesy ending. Now it’s time for some notes:

• S.S. Wilson directed Tremors 4: The Legend Begins and Tremors II: Aftershocks (week 360).
• Tremors 4: The Legend Begins has put Michael Gross at seven Sunday “Bad” Movies entries. The other six were Cool As Ice (week 348), Tremors (week 360), Tremors II: Aftershocks (week 360), Tremors 3: Back to Perfection (week 360), Ground Control (week 474), and Atlas Shrugged: Part II (week 490).
• Matthew Seth Wilson returned from Tremors 3: Back to Perfection (week 360) to be in Tremors 4: The Legend Begins.
• Tremors 4: The Legend Begins featured J.E. Freeman, who was previously seen in Aces: Iron Eagle III (week 90).
• Ming Lo was in Tremors 4: The Legend Begins and Kung Pow: Enter the Fist (week 234).
• Have you seen Tremors 4: The Legend Begins? What did you think? Was it a good prequel, or did it leave something to be desired? What makes a good prequel? Give me all your thoughts on Twitter or in the comments.
• If there’s a movie that you think would fit into the Sunday “Bad” Movies schedule, hit me up on Twitter and tell me about it. I’m always looking for movies to add in here that I may not have thought of otherwise. You could also drop your suggestions in the comments below.
• Check out Sunday “Bad” Movies on Instagram, too.
• It’s time to look at next week’s movie. It isn’t going to be another franchise movie. I’m putting the franchises on hold for a bit. It does share some similarities to the Tremors movies, though. It’s a small group of people fighting off some monsters. Only, instead of a small western town, it’s on a spaceship. Instead of graboids, it’s alien parasites. I’ll be checking out a 2020 movie called Breach. Come back next week to see what I thought about it. See you then.