Season 2 & 3
A great, low key detective series with a british spy ex-pat in Italy. More relation building in these seasons compared to season 1. I do wonder how realistic the travel is because it did seem like there were a couple of 1-hour driving trips from one coast to the other, or day trips to Rome and back. Maybe that is realistic? Or maybe that is like a movie version of driving to a lunch meeting from Pasadena to San Francisco...
3 stars (out of 5)
Racism is ugly. I am always surprised by just how ugly. This movie is set up as a guy trying to get his cousin out of a tight spot. But as a black man traveling through an ultra racist and corrupt southern town, there is no chance that it will go smoothly. And we just accept that as true, having become almost a trope in filmmaking. The storyline is solid and the action quality, but the intro scene and the basis of the story is highly disturbing. If only it weren't so real.
4 stars (out of 5)
A John Woo remake of his original 1989 film of the same name. This version is set in France where a contract killer (known in street lore as Queen of the Dead) makes a decision not to kill a young singer in a nightclub who she sees as collateral damage during a hit. This decision drives the entire rest of the plot, bringing conflict with her own ethic, her boss and interactions with the police (played by Omar Sy whom I loved in Lupin). This is largely a formulaic assassin movie with great fight scenes and shoot outs, but not much novel (I mean, it is a remake). Probably need to add the original to my watch list just for fun.
3 stars (out of 5)
A highly disturbing (on many levels) war thriller. The story features a radicalized U.S. Muslim man who has built and planted nuclear bombs in 3 U.S. cities. He is captured and the entirety of the film is the interrogation drama that unfolds to find where he has hidden the bombs. Seems like it is basically a window into "enhanced interrogation techniques" (i.e. torture) and the effect on all the people involved. Truly horrible from all points of view. You leave this wondering one thing: how are humans capable of being so in-human? Or is our aspirational ideal of "humanity" just naïveté and the real surprise is those who move away from in-humanity? I don't recommend this movie.
2 stars (out of 5)
Recruited straight out of law school to work for the CIA, Owen is trying to understand what it means to work at a place where everything is secret or suspicious. He stumbles on a case of a former asset wanting to get out of jail in return for not exposing CIA operatives. A nice 8-episode series that has Owen traveling all over the world, and back and forth between DC and Phoenix quite a bit, while he learns who he can trust and how to do the job of lawyering. Effectively he is a combo lawyer/action hero - with only a bit of bumbling. I experienced the script to be pretty tight, not stringing me along just to get another episode in. I definitely binged this one.
4 stars (out of 5)
A husband and wife have secrets. This Korean action film tells the story of the wife, who is an ace special detective in the police, and the husband, who is the perfect stay-at-home husband. Until trouble comes their way and husbands past life as a military special forces operative comes back to life. The two work together to take down a threat to the country. Pretty basic storyline, but well written and streamlined. We get enough to know the characters without massive dialogue backstory, etc.
4 stars (out of 5)
Berry and Wahlberg join forces as a professional spy and regular guy out to save the world. The story device uses "the union" as the novel take on an independent, extra-governmental spy agency that saves the world from bad guys. Union because the recruits are regular people with blue collar jobs. Genres of buddy cop, rom com, spy action thriller all fused into one. Somehow it mostly works. Not a work of art, but entertaining and engaging in all of its trope-y-ness.
3 stars (out of 5)
