FBI upstart Eric O'Neill enters into a power game with his boss, Robert Hanssen, an agent who was put on trial for selling secrets to the Soviet Union.FBI upstart Eric O'Neill enters into a power game with his boss, Robert Hanssen, an agent who was put on trial for selling secrets to the Soviet Union.FBI upstart Eric O'Neill enters into a power game with his boss, Robert Hanssen, an agent who was put on trial for selling secrets to the Soviet Union.
- Awards
- 1 win & 3 nominations
- Agent Loper
- (as Courtenay Stevens)
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaIn the hallway, we constantly see a poster with names and pictures of spies that have been caught, as well as short narratives of what their crimes were and how much time they're serving. These posters really exist in secure government facilities, and prominently displayed on all of them, since the events of this movie took place, is a photo of Robert Hanssen.
- GoofsEric and Robert enter a church and Eric makes the sign of the cross incorrectly, touching his shoulders before his sternum. Since much of the plot involves Eric's and Robert's Catholicism, it would have been an error that would have made Robert suspicious.
- Quotes
Eric O'Neill: What if he's smarter than I am?
Kate Burroughs: A couple of years ago, the bureau put together a task force. Lots of assets had been disappearing. So this task force was formed to find the mole who was giving them up. Our best analysts poring over data for years looking for the guy, and they could never quite find him. Guess who was put in charge of the task force? He was smarter than all of us. Actually, I can live with that part. It's the idea that my entire career has been a waste of time, that's the part I hate. Everything I've done since I got to this office, everything we've all been paid to do, he was undoing it. We all coulda just stayed home.
- ConnectionsFeatured in HBO First Look: Breach (2007)
- SoundtracksNear You
Written by Francis Craig, Kermit Goell
Performed by The Andrews Sisters
Courtesy of Geffen Records
Under license from Universal Music Enterprises
And there is a formulaic bit about damaging fathers and odd wives. More: there's the project command center that is drawn from movies and not from life. And finally, our hero is told the FBI's biggest secret in an open public place. This would never ever happen, and it is staged this way only to help the pacing of the thing in terms of stagecraft. And that DIA computer room, with the nice clean Cray-like machines, is from the same fantasy world as "Red October's" neon-lighted missile tubes.
But in spite of all this, it works. And especially compared to "The Departed," it works, simply, cleanly, deeply.
That's because the filmmaker decided early in the game that he was going to do what the Hong Kong "Infernal Affairs" did well and others copied: this business of actors playing characters who are actors. In this case, we have two such in the same boat.
We have a top information manager at the FBI working for the Russians and acting normal, even when leading the hunt for himself. We have the young under cover guy pretending to be simply a clerk. Each intuits the other is watching. The older man completely wins at the start, with the younger man eventually besting him in artifice. Its a calculation that the filmmaker makes, when deciding not to tell us why our young hero does what he does and where he gets the tools. In an ordinary story, that would hurt, but here it is a wise decision because such "explaining" would get in the way of the economy of the thing. And it is all about economic connection with us.
Its a bit counterintuitive that effective stories sometimes get better by lopping off story elements and information. But it is true. Some students of the Hanssen case believe that Hanssen's primary motive was to show his own importance (as a information security planner) by revealing holes in the system that he would have plugged. I wish this film would have worked with that a bit, because this notion of helping the system by hurting is system is both what the story could have been about and the means used to tell the story.
Still, a good one.
As a historical note, there's a reason folks from the FBI and CIA, even senior ones, can't wander into NSA computing facilities. Hanssen wasn't allowed, probably a good thing at the time. Opus Dei again.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.
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Details
- Release date
- Country of origin
- Languages
- Also known as
- Hanssen
- Filming locations
- Production companies
- See more company credits at IMDbPro
Box office
- Gross US & Canada
- $33,231,264
- Opening weekend US & Canada
- $10,504,990
- Feb 18, 2007
- Gross worldwide
- $40,953,935
- Runtime1 hour 50 minutes
- Color
- Sound mix
- Aspect ratio
- 1.85 : 1
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