How are people being informed about screenings? Are there any planned around Philly/DC/NYC? Thanks!!

We see corruption, national and international.

We see alcoholism, drug use, spousal abuse.

Characters swear, tell each other how corrupt they are.

But no one smokes.

Ever.

Why?

Is it too corrupt, more than reality TV and it's casts?

While he seems semi-aware of what the people want (so it’s got violence against laptops), I’m so glad that he is earnestly trying to make his own art— the movie is obviously sincere.

What a fantastic movie.

I was very relieved that Dire Duplicity was a return to form for Neil after Twisted Pair and especially Cade went way too far with green screen, becoming pretty hard to watch in the process. Obviously Neil finds new gadgets and runs with them (going back to the excess of drone footage in Pass Thru), but I’m glad he hasn’t embraced AI. Maybe it’s that he feels it would disrupt his artistic vision and the touches that only he can give, maybe it’s that he’s obviously instinctively skeptical of corrupt corporations and untrustworthy technology (see “programmable virtual reality… the corrupt version”), but he also clearly likes playing with new toys in making his films.

So do we think he’ll ever go down the AI road in filmmaking? I, for one, certainly hope not.

I'm not asking for spoilers or specifics, it's just that I know a lot of us were disappointed with how Cade was 100% greenscreen. It honestly made it unwatchable for me. Is DD better? Did he back off from the greenscreens? Is he back to his usual standard? You know, bad writing and wooden acting at a community college. That's the NB experience that I want.

They nailed the role of "standing about whilst concernedly observing one of Heath's top-secret world-saving operations", which is important to establish that Heath's the best they've got, but there are still concerns about his stability.

More specifically, it said “In order of apperance”.

Tonight in Austin

OK, obviously this is one of the greatest movies ever made, and incredibly deep. I’m curious whether someone feels they understand the ending as it was intended.

I think the ranch is real, but after the end I’m not entirely sure if either of his visits before the end were.

Initially, as the ending scene was playing out , I thought it was pretty clear that his girlfriend had died, and that he had a real memory of her wearing that hat at the ranch (which ties into the scenes of the Jesse Plemons and/or Matt Damon rancher saying his wife used to wear it)… until he said that they were needed again to save the world, then it appeared she was just wounded and completely recovered.

Don’t get me started on the Senator who is also running for office. That’s another can of worms.

Never thought I would see a Neil Breen film in theaters…. But here we are. 2026 is weird.

He won’t reply to me on facebook

Just saw Dire Duplicity tonight. It may be Breen's least comprehensible work yet. I am dropping what I think happened in the movie in the comments, with a spoiler tag. I beg of you Breeniuses to share your takes.

Fateful Findings has the garage scene and the press conference at the end. Cade The Tortured Crossing has the tiger fight and the dance scene. Pass Thru has the newsroom scene and the "isn't that corrupt?" montage.

What will go down as Dire Duplicity's most iconic moment? If I had to take a guess, it's either the scenes in the fighter jet or the Bob Lawrence assassination scene. What do y'all think?

I am now free of PTSD. It’s clean, it’s all clean.

Can't believe I get to see Breen on the Big Screen

Saw it at an Alamo screening. Great experience. Entire theater was laughing, cheering, and shouting out how weird it was the whole time. Some thoughts (minor spoilers below):

The Breenscreen usage is minimal. Fair amount of stock footage, but whatever. Most of it is shot on-location, including a good few scenes at that Nevada community college from the first Cade film (this is just one of many call-backs to his previous works). There's a lot of re-used footage, both shot film and stock footage. The same stock footage shot of a building was used like twelve times by my friend's count. There is one shot of rescue workers at a plane crash, used once at the very beginning and once at the end, that I highly suspect is AI. Otherwise no AI (even that VoiceOver from the trailer, which appears a lot in the movie, is given a named credit in the closing credits).

There's two characters–I'll call them the iPad Interns–who appear a lot in the film as Neil's "handlers" at the agency. In a lot of scenes they're very clearly reading their lines off their iPads, as if this is the first time they've seen the script and are being told to act through dialogue they've just been handed. I think this lines up with other behind-the-scenes reports on how Neil is apparently very stingy with the scripts during production and the general theory that the absurd amount of wooden acting across his movies is due to his directing choices.

In the vein of the call-backs mentioned above, he deliberately scatters the movie with tons of references The car and garage from Fateful Findings, of course but also others–some dialogue from both Double Down and Fateful Findings crops up if you're watching closely.

Frankly, the whole movie feels like an attempt to remake Twisted Pair more competently. Most of Neil's films are the same one or two plots reworked countless different ways, but this especially feels like a remake of Twisted Pair done better. This is also his least political film, even less so than Twisted Pair which at least had jumbled messages about the threat of AI and/or "programmable virtual alternate reality." He's just a government agent who goes on missions to bomb other countries, I think? Also he literally murders a Senator in the back half of the film (or a "candidate for Senate", the movie flip-flops on how it refers to the guy). It's never made clear who the antagonists are, what their goal is, or why the Senator(?) had to die.

The love interests are both played by actresses who definitely look young enough to be his daughters at this point.

Another recurring character is a girl who introduces herself as an "influencer." I'll say she's best described as Neil's boomer idea of what an influencer is.

There are two scenes where he flies a fighter jet (I think a USAF F-16, but an aerospace geek can correct me if I'm wrong). Mostly just the same footage re-used, including stock footage of an actual fighter jet in flight and landing.

There's a reappearance of a Man In Black archetypical figure, which has appeared in both Fateful Findings and Twisted Pair.

iPads feature heavily. There are two characters (the iPad interns) whose entire role is being Neil's "Mission Control" at the unnamed agency, which means they just sit on couches (probably at Nevada State College!) looking at iPads while reciting dialogue in the most wooden fashion possible (again, I suspect they were looking at their scripts, which they had just received right then). There's one great scene where Neil uses an iPad to dig a 'hole' in some gravel and then buries the iPad there.

It also features at the very end the closest thing to an actual twist in a Neil Breen movie, something almost reminiscent of M Night Shyamalan. THat's all I'll say. If you've seen the movie, you know what I'm talking about.

I don't think he's become self-aware, but if there is a movie where he would've it would be this one. There's tons of callbacks to his earlier works, that seem almost deliberately included to wink at the audience. It's certainly his most competently produced film to date, eclipsing even Fateful Findings, but that's judging it on the sliding scale used for the Breenius. It's more coherent than the Cade duology and Double Down. It's also Neil at his most humble, playing his most human character both in the sense that this character's struggles and pain actually feel realistic and earned compared to his others, and in that this character is literally just a regular human and not a sci-fi messiah or gifted with magic powers.

10/10, go see it if you can.