Breakout — Breakout(Blu Ray)
which he was being held.
Charles Bronson plays pilot Nick Colton, a pilot who is hired for $50,000 dollars to head to Mexico in order to free Jay Wagner (played by Robert Duvall) who was framed for murder and sent to prison for 28 years. Wagner’s wife, Anne (Charles Bronson’s wife at the time, Jill Ireland) hires Colton to head down to Mexico and break her husband out of jail. After several bungled attempts, Colton becomes convinced that someone is feeding information to the prison guards on his attempts to free Wagner and takes the matter into his own hands.
Breakout is a good solid movie with a great cast. We get to see a different side to the Charles Bronson who we were familiar with at this time. The tough, quiet man of few words from films like Once Upon A Time in the West and Death Wish gets to take a lighter role here, even getting to try his hand at a little bit of comedy. His on-screen rapport with Ireland is a pleasure to watch and whilst the two characters are obviously attracted to one another there is no real relationship to speak of, but the sparks do fly whenever they share screen time. Robert Duvall is solid as the unfortunate Wagner, and Sheree North is great as Myrna. It’s also great to see a young Randy Quaid as Hawkins still in the early days of his career, and the legendary John Huston towards the end of his illustrious career as Duvall’s sleazy grandfather.
Breakout never reaches the heights of Bronson’s finer work, however it is a fun little film which makes for an enjoyable hour and a half. Powerhouse have done a great job with the film, the images are crisp and the colours look very natural. You can tell what an amazing job they’ve done by comparing the print with the scratchy looking trailer, which is of vastly inferior quality to the lovely print on display here. I dare say it’s never looked better than it does on this disc today. It’s great that a company like Powerhouse are giving underappreciated gems like Breakout swanky new releases.
The disc is rounded out with a wealth of great bonus material, as well as the usual trailers, TV spots and image gallery we are treated to an audio commentary from film historian Paul Talbot, a short news film from Spanish TV called ‘Filming Breakout’, as well as the Super 8 version of the film, which is something I’d love to see done more often . It’s fascinating to see how the film was edited down for the Super 8 format.
Overall, this is a great package, and as I have already pointed out it’s great to see less celebrated films like this being given this sort of treatment through their Indicator series. This is a limited edition release of only 3,000 copies so grab one while you can as I doubt they’ll stick around for long. If I was marking this on the package I would definitely give it a 5, however the film itself is a good solid 4 so that’s what I’m rating it.