Movie Review: BREAKING...

Earlier today, I watched the dramatic crime thriller Breaking at AMC theaters.

This film stars John Boyega as Brian Brown-Easley...a former Marine veteran who held up a Wells Fargo bank in 2017 to get the attention of the media after the local Department of Veterans Affairs office wouldn't pay Brown-Easley the money that was owed to him.

I don't know how accurate Breaking is to the actual event that occurred in Cobb County, Georgia half a decade ago, but I will say this: John Boyega needs to receive a Best Actor nomination (at the Academy Awards, Golden Globes and elsewhere) for his performance in the Abi Damaris Corbin-directed movie!

Boyega did an excellent job conveying the pain, desperation and conflict that Brown-Easley must have felt as he tragically risked his life to bring attention to a government bureaucracy that did him wrong. Also giving commendable performances in Breaking are Nicole Beharie and Selenis Leyva—who played the two Wells Fargo employees (Estel Valerie and Rosa Diaz, respectively) taken hostage by Brown-Easley at the bank.

The late Michael Kenneth Williams was terrific as Eli Bernard, a police negotiator who did everything he could to get Brown-Easley out of his lethal ordeal. Connie Britton was great as news journalist Lisa Larson...who also did all that she could to publicize Brown-Easley's desperate plight to the world.

(I only went on IMDb to look up the character names in this film, but I haven't yet done full research on the actual incident to see if the names of everyone but Brown-Easley were fictionalized.)

As mentioned earlier, John Boyega definitely deserves recognition for Breaking in the next awards season. Boyega says that he's done with appearing as Finn in live-action Star Wars movies, and receiving a major accolade such as an Oscar for Breaking would only solidify his stance that he deserves to leave a more respectable mark in cinema. That is all.