At the onset of the film we see immediate tension. Will is with his girlfriend Liv (Robin Wright Penn) and he talks about how your relationship is on the rocks when you don’t look at each other anymore. As the movie progresses we are introduced to the project that Will and his partner Sandy (Martin Freeman) are working on.

Will and Sandy’s office is robbed repeatedly. This causes tension, along with Will’s relationship problems. It helps also to give him an excuse to stay out and not go home. When finally he’s able to track down one of the robbers, he follows the robber home. And then he begins a weird affair with the mother, who is a tailor.

With that last line, many readers would have been going, "Huh? Wait? What was that again?" Yeah, it’s weird, twisted, and lacks all kinds of logic. Breaking and Entering asks for these leaps of faith which are rather difficult to allow.

What makes these leaps of faith even more hard to take are many horrendous lines. It tries to strike our hearts with tender moments, but these moments fall flat because of dialogue that is either unrealistic, or just plain cheesy.

There are attempts here to connect various conflicts, to throw together different lives and see how they interact. But, somehow, the dramatic fulcrum is Will’s relationship issues, and in the light of the possible developments and other issues that the film could explore, it opts to go with the simple matters of the heart.

For example, once Will tumbles into this twisted love affair with the thief’s mother Amira (Juliette Binoche) there is material she can use against him to force him to drop the charges against his son. But this never escalates to a point where it could be life-shattering for either party. Then there’s the underworld element potentially at play, but it is left to the periphery; the possibility of that dark underworld coming into the film and having a real bearing on the characters’ lives is never explored.

What we have more than that is much tentativeness and a movie that prefers to tiptoe around issues rather than face them head on. We have all kinds of conflict introduced. There’s Will relationship with his girlfriend, Will’s relationship with Amira, Sandy’s crush on a cleaner, a prostitute the boys meet, the robberies themselves, and throw in a few more. This should result in much happening. But for most of the movie you wind up waiting for things to happen.

You allow a movie some time to develop, and consider that some movies go for a slow boil and then everything starts heating up. But Breaking and Entering starts with a slow boil and never progresses beyond that. Up till the end nothing big or explosive or truly moving happens, even with so much potential for it. And so that’s how Breaking and Entering feels after a viewing, there’s so much here, so much that could have been, but just isn’t there.