For the last couple of years, Bruce Willis has been on autopilot. Push a pile of cash his way and he’ll star in anything, resulting in a string of abysmal straight-to-VOD duds like Hard Kill, Cosmic Sin, Survive the Night and Trauma Center. Despite being front and center on the poster, Willis generally plays a supporting role in these movies, expending the minimum effort needed to pick up his cheque. His latest is now available on Amazon Prime Video, with sci-fi horror Breach (previously known as Anti-Life) appearing on the platform a few days ago.
For once, Willis plays the lead role and sticks around for the duration of the pic, though this doesn’t improve the film. He portrays a predictably grumpy spaceship janitor named Clay, who finds his ship under siege from a sinister parasite that begins consuming the crew. Willis organizes his cleaning team into an ersatz fighting force and uses improvised weaponry made of cleaning supplies to fight back the parasite before it’s too late.
Reviews have drawn comparisons between Breach and Aliens, The Thing, and Dawn of the Dead, but sadly the resemblances are just superficial and it’s nowhere near them in quality. It’s currently sitting at an unimpressive 21% on the Tomatometer, with critics describing it as “completely forgettable,” as producing unintentional laughter and as having “horrible direction and writing.” Perhaps the finest summary comes from Flickering Myth, who say: “Breach isn’t nearly as offensively lazy as most of [Willis’] recent direct-to-consumer action flicks… even if you’d be hard-pressed to ever call it genuinely good.”
Bruce Willis has a whole bunch of films of this ilk in various stages of production, most with super generic titles like A Day to Die, Killing Field and Out of Death. But there are also the rumors of him returning to his most iconic role in Die Hard: Year One, which is rumored to be both a prequel and sequel to the Die Hard franchise. Then again, given how crap A Good Day to Die Hard was, maybe it’s best that John McClane stays in retirement.
Breach is now available to stream on Amazon Prime Video.