Breaking film review — John Boyega holds up a bank in nerve-shredding thriller

Brian Brown-Easley (John Boyega) walks into a Wells Fargo bank in a suburb of Georgia. He politely conducts a minor transaction with the teller, Rosa Diaz (Selenis Leyva), who smiles warmly and joshes with him right up to the moment when he reveals he is carrying a bomb. As luck would have it, bank manager Estel Valerie (Nicole Beharie) sees the smile vanish from Rosa’s face, grasps that something is very wrong and quietly shoos most of the customers out of the building. Thanks to Estel’s quick thinking, only she and Rosa are taken hostage.

This may sound like a bank robbery, but Brian has something else in mind: forcing the US Department of Veterans Affairs to pay out the nearly $900 owed to him as an honourably discharged US Marine, but withheld due to a clerical issue.

So begins the almost unbearably sad and nerve-shredding thriller Breaking. That it’s based on a true story is evident in weird but plausible details. At one point, the bank’s phone rings and Brian politely answers and takes a message from a customer. When they call back later, he is more agitated and says it’s not a good time to talk because he’s about to blow up the bank. Much less comical are the interactions, ripe with unstated racial animus, between a sympathetic police hostage negotiator (the great Michael Kenneth Williams in his last role) and his dead-eyed colleague, who is clearly itching to shoot Brian and get back to his doughnuts.

Boyega modulates his performance with masterly precision, letting Brian’s mental instability shine through in vivid flashes. Above all, he gets across Brian’s tragic humanity, understandable frustration and intense love for his daughter, who he suspects he will never see again. Although the bank-bomb-hostage situation isn’t an everyday occurrence, writer-director Abi Damaris Corbin gently hints at how common factors such as bureaucratic inefficiency, institutional racism and the US’s culture of violence all share responsibility for what unfolds.

★★★★☆

On digital platforms now