Breakdown
- Jun 3
- 2 min read
You know you’re in good hands when a filmmaker takes a calm, everyday setting—maybe even one that evokes a feeling of serenity and beauty, as Hitchcock often did—and suddenly reverses it, turning that calm into a stunning trap from which there is seemingly no escape.
That’s exactly the hook of the 1997 movie Breakdown, a terrific Hitchcock-like mystery that turns a road trip full of promise into a nerve-wracking ordeal filled with desperation and terror. Unlike other movies that often use the “road trip to hell” scenario to unleash stories of brutality and gruesome violence, Breakdown is more of a psychological fever dream.
Actors Kurt Russell and Kathleen Quinlan portray a young, happily married couple, driving their brand-new car across the American southwest, on their way to California where the husband is starting a new job. All around them, the desert landscape is awash in stunning colors. Life is good!
That is until their car breaks down and the good life leaves them stranded on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere.
As if that’s not bad enough, the only other vehicle in sight is a battered pickup driven by a scary-looking dude who briefly harassed the couple when they stopped for gas a few miles back. When the driver of the pickup stops near where the couple has broken down and just watches them, making no move to help, the couple becomes nervous. They wonder what the hell he’s up to.
Just then, a semi-trailer rumbles down the lonesome highway and comes to stop. With that, the menacing pickup speeds off and the couple heave a sigh of relief, glad that trouble’s over.
When the driver of the semi offers to help, the couple accepts. But because the car is new and the husband wants to protect it from being stolen, he wants to stay with it. Meanwhile his wife decides to ride with the trucker to a nearby diner where she’ll call for a tow truck and be back with help in no time.
While she’s gone, however, the husband finds that a loose wire is to blame for the car breaking down. With the car suddenly working again, the husband races to the diner, anxious to give his wife the good news. But when he gets there, the husband discovers the glue trap of trouble that he’s really in. At the diner, not only is his wife not there, but the owner and the other customers have never even seen her.
To say more about what happens next as the husband frantically searches for his wife would spoil the pleasures of this mostly tightly plotted action-thriller. Directed and co-written by Jonathan Mostow, Breakdown is a breathless, suspense-filled road trip to hell, for sure. If you’re up for that kind of excitement, I urge you to take the ride. I give it a solid three out of four-stars.
