Holmes (Basil Rathbone) and Watson (Nigel Bruce) are back in action, confronting and dealing with more World War II espionage as Sherlock Holmes heads to the new world. Not even using a Sir Arthur Conan Doyle story as a launching point, the story is short, simple, and honestly, didn’t really need Holmes’ insight. A British…
Tag: secret service
Along Came a Spider (1993) – James Patterson
So the idea of digging into the Alex Cross series has been nagging at me for awhile. But it seemed like there were so many, thirty-two at last count. Then I reminded myself I’ve been reading Star Trek books in order for awhile, and there’s a lot more than those. So… I’d seen the film…
Angel Has Fallen (2019) – Ric Roman Waugh
This time it’s personal. The second sequel in the ‘Has Fallen’ series is probably the worst of the bunch and lacks the scope of the first two films, and while there are a couple of interesting action sequences there’s nothing matching the scale of the previous entries. Trumbull (Morgan Freeman) is now the president, there’s…
London Has Fallen (2016) – Babak Najafi
Secret Service Agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) is preparing to tender his resignation and see to his about-to-grow family with an expecting Leah (Radha Mitchell) when the world interferes again. This time, he and the president, Benjamin Asher (Aaron Eckhart) are off to London to attend a funeral; the British Prime Minister suffered a heart…
Atomic Blonde (2017) – David Leitch
Charlize Theron is here to kick ass in Atomic Blonde and she does, and does it well. Based on the graphic novel The Coldest City, Atomic Blonde is a spy-thriller that features some solid stunt and fight work, the majority of which Theron, much like Keanu Reeves for John Wick did as much of as…
Partners in Crime (1929) – Agatha Christie
Tommy and Tuppence, who quickly became one of my favourite creations of Agatha Christie, first introduced in The Secret Adversary, are back in this collection of short stories, that are interconnected, as the married couple take on a number of cases. A Fairy in the Flat opens the book and reveals that Tommy is working…
Brokenclaw (1990) – John Gardner
James Bond is back in action this week in John Gardner’s tenth 007 book, and probably my least favourite of the series at the moment. This one took me too long to get into, and then I felt not a lot really happened in the story to begin with until the climax. Bond is in…
To Live and Die In L.A. (1985) – William Friedkin
I don’t know how it happens, but between the watching and the re-watching, I constantly forget how awesome To Live and Die In L.A. is. I know it’s good, I love this movie, but I seem to be consistently stunned every time I settle in for this one. Amazingly I didn’t see this film upon…
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) – Alfred Hitchcock
James Stewart and Doris Day find themselves caught up in international intrigue and a political assassination in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, a remake of his own film from 1934. While on a working holiday that takes the family to Paris, Casablanca and Marrakesh, Dr. Benjamin McKenna (Stewart), his wife, Jo (Day)…
From Russia With Love (1957) – Ian Fleming
This week I dove into Ian Fleming’s fifth James Bond novel, and the one that was most closely adapted for the big screen, though SPECTRE is slipped into the film version, whereas in this tale it is simply east versus west as SMERSH, the Russian spy organisation comes up with a plan to humiliate the…
The Mind Reels 