Jonathon Mostow's Breakdown belongs to an almost forgotten genre of Hollywood film: the credible action movie. It tells the story of a couple (Kurt Russell and Kathleen Quinlan) whose new 4WD breaks down in the American desert; when Quinlan hitches a ride from a seemingly friendly trucker (J.T. Walsh) to call a tow truck, she disappears. Russell gets little help from local police, and must track down his wife essentially unaided.

The basic setup is a good one, and you can tell Mostow's been watching the right movies. The opening, in particular, is straight out of Spielberg's classic Duel, and other stretches recall John Boorman's Deliverance. Like these predecessors, it plays on the suburbanite's fear of the great outdoors, which is inevitably populated by redneck hicks named Earl. Just as Duel's fascination derived from the plausability of its situations, Breakdown's strength is that its hero is an average guy and his situation seems unlucky rather than impossible. The film strays further from reality as it goes, and this weakens the film a little, but by current action standards it's practically a documentary. 

Mostow handles both suspense and action well; there's a chase at the end that you'd swear was directed by George Miller. Russell, in the central role, doesn't look as vulnerable as Dennis Weaver did in Duel, but he does a good job of projecting insecurity - his looks mark him as a glamorous yuppie rather than an indomitable action hero. The villains (and assorted locals) are played by the familiar gaggle of character actors you always see in these yokel roles, with J.T. Walsh particularly menacing as their leader and spokesman.