Eric O’Neill (Ryan Phillippe) is a young FBI recruit with an expertise in surveillance longing to become an agent. His talents catching the eye of Kate Burroughs (Laura Linney), one of the agency’s senior officers, he is suddenly tasked to keep an eye on of the government’s own, respected senior analyst Robert Hanssen (Chris Cooper). Working under the cover as his assistant, O’Neill is supposed to document every one of Hanssen’s moves, Burroughs and her superiors hoping to uncover evidence of veteran officer’s sexual deviancy before the press gets wind of it.

Quickly the young man realizes this story fed to him by the driven blonde agent is a load of bull. Hanssen is a devoted husband, father, grandfather and Catholic, and any deviancy on his part – if there even is any – is so well hidden O’Neill doubts he’s ever going to uncover it. No, something else is going on, and after confronting his new boss the wannabe agent can’t believe his ears. Hanssen is a spy, a Russian spy to be exact, and has been for decades, and with O’Neill’s help the FBI finally hopes to catch him in the act and find out just how much damage their one-time trusted agent has really caused.

Based on the true story, Billy Ray’s Breach is an exciting, old-school political thriller along the same lines as All the President’s Men or Syriana. It is a film where nothing is as it seems and unnecessary bureaucracy might be the chief impediment to justice, tension building with slow, steady intelligence the story finally unleashing a striking coda of pained justice that’s truly breathtaking.

That said, this one doesn’t have quite the same momentum and urgent sophistication of Ray’s previous winner Shattered Glass. While the two pictures are obviously similar in many ways, that journalistic suspense flick had a consistent energy and a thrilling immediacy this one sometimes lacks. In fact, the first third of this one is shockingly inert, and it isn’t until O’Neill is finally let in on the FBI’s game that things really take off and sprint across the lawn.

But these problems are relatively minor. Unlike Robert DeNiro’s The Good Shepherd which coincidentally covered many of the same themes presented here, Breach knows just how long to stay around before showing itself to the door. This one is nowhere near as ponderous a sit as that. Better, Phillippe’s O’Neill is a far more interesting and alive a character than Matt Damon’s CIA agent ever was, and while the same quandaries assault both of them (i.e. at what point does playing in the world of secrets for your country exact too high a cost), this time I was far more interested in the outcome.

It is Oscar-winner Cooper who is the main draw here, however, his performance as the ultra-secretive Hanssen as good as any he’s probably ever given. The man is a multilayered mess of idiosyncratic quirks and ticks so intelligent he makes Bill Gates look like an illiterate garbage man. He’s a fascinating character, a villain for the ages full of pained pathos and unknown interior machinations that just by walking into a room the man can’t help but send a chill straight up your spine.

So why did Hanssen do it? The movie doesn’t choose to speculate, giving the both the character and the feature a sinister ambience that perfectly suits the material. There is a chilling aspect to all of this that’s sensationally sinister, Ray managing to craft an intoxicating web that had me virtually spellbound the majority of the way through. For a sophomore effort, Breach is awfully darn good, making the filmmaker a hot-button auteur I can’t wait to see what he’s got up his sleeve next.

Film Rating: êêê  (out of 4)